The Jon Rose Web - The Tramp

Violin Pegs, Rosenberg Museum, Berlin, 1999
Record Playing Violin, Rosenberg Museum, Brno, 2009
Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor play The Fence, Strzelecki Track, 2004
Clock Violins, Rosenberg Museum, Berlin, 1988
The 10 String Double Violin, Sydney, 1982
Rosenberg Museum, Sydney, 2018
The Data Driven Violin, Rosenberg Museum, Berlin, 2015
Interactive Violin Bow Mark 4
Part of the Violin Collection, Rosenberg Museum, 2018
Street Sign from the Town of Violin, Slovakia
12 String Perspex Cello, The Rosenberg Museum, 2018

The Tramp

SR 1993

Radio inside a Violin: A gift to Jon Rose by the marketing department of WDR Cologne

Produced for Robert Karge at Saarländischer Rundfunk as 'Der Landstreicher'.
Text and violin - Jon Rose
Round Midnite by Thelonius Monk (features Alexander Von Schlippenbach on MIDI keyboard).
Direction and Mr. 'fix it' for SR Stefan Dutt
In German, in case you were wondering

A violin playing tramp journeys through the streets and sewers (a huge thank you to the Sewage department at Saarbrücken for access to the sewers), meditating on the decline of civilisation, the species, and everything. This is a depressing and very black piece! As the tramp goes through the garbage, the chorus shouts out a litany of woe (mainly environmental) and eventually hurls its abuse and hatred at him too. This production was recorded just after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Now 30 years later, we know just how much we have screwed the environment. The tramp is not bothered, concentrating on life's little pleasures... like picking his nose. (Extract from the original full length production).

What's New

October 2024

'A Violin Bow for John Cage' - new interactive works based on a recording lost for over 20 years, featuring an interview with Cage from 1988 on the subject of the violin. On line here.

New York, Alice Springs

November 2024-5

'The Singing Telegraph' - an intervention into the history of the Overland Telegraph which stretched uninvited over the land of the Kaytetye people. Working with the Tara Community, this on going project incorporates ancient, colonial, and modern technologies and languages with new music and multi-media outcomes here

Tara, Northern Territory

March 2024

'Night Songs' celebrates an interspecies multi-media engagement between the ancient music of a uniquely Australian songbird - Cracticus nigrogularis (the Pied Butcherbird) and Australia's premiere new music group Ensemble Offspring. Documentation here.

The Adelaide Festival