Music From 4 Fences
For over 30-years the Kronos Quartet has ripped open the musical realm of the string quartet. Through unorthodox collaborations and eclectic commissioning, Kronos have become one of the most celebrated and influential music ensembles.
‘… there is only one group in the world who would be willing to put themselves on the line for a project utilising industrial strength wire.’
Over a similar period of time, Jon Rose has striven to explode and reshape the violin and other string instruments through improvisation and invention. Since the early 1980s Rose has played and recorded hundreds of wire fences around the world. Rose has designed and constructed four new musical fences specifically for this collaboration.
Through Music From 4 Fences, Kronos and Rose come together to unearth the hidden music of metal fences. As Rose predicts: ‘those who hear Music From 4 Fences will never look at a fence in quite the same way again.’
Jon Rose’s Music From 4 Fences was performed by the Kronos Quartet at the Sydney Opera House on Friday 5 June 2009.
[Image]: Christina Johnson (courtesy Jon Rose website)
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Quick Interview with Jon Rose (via email)
Building Musical Fences via US Customs
clatterbox: When did you first start playing fences, and what is it about fences, particularly wire fences, that draws you in?
Rose: 1983. Coming from a period of intense experimentation with strings, one question always in my mind was what happens when the strings get longer and longer?
clatterbox: How many fences would you estimate that you’ve played?
Rose: In the 100s but I couldn’t put a figure on it.
clatterbox: For many years you’ve been a finder of fences around the world – playing and recording a huge variety of existing fences. Was the process of designing and building a set of new fences difficult?
Rose: In essence not because I’ve built a lot of fences in gallery situations. But David Harrington was very specific, this fence had to be mobile, put together and taken down again at the end of the gig, free standing (no holes in expensive stages), playable, light enough for transportation, fit into boxes. All this presented new and difficult problems as most fences are fixed to the ground somehow. The tension in one fence that would go right the way across the kind of stages Kronos play on would be impossible to handle in a free standing fence, so I went with 4 separate fences, one for each of them!
Also they live in San Francisco, so I smuggled a fence in with me on each of the two trips I made to get this project up and running. What do you say at US customs?
clatterbox: Are there elements that you’ve built into these new fences that reflect specific fences you’ve played somewhere in the world?
Rose: None except we are using real fence wire and real strainers.
clatterbox: Are there ideas or techniques from your other instrument building projects that you’ve incorporated into the building and playing of these fences?
Rose: The use of cheap piezos is quite specific, they have to be put under pressure to get good stuff out of them.
clatterbox: Could you describe the overall construction of the fences (e.g. dimensions, materials, tuning etc.)
Rose: I think that might be giving the game away except to say that there are 4 and they are mobile – the frames that hold the 5 fence wires, including one strand of barbed wire, are the lightest strongest metal I could find i.e. aluminium. Problem is that the mills in China don’t stick to one gauge very well, so the reinforced sections are a pain to fit in the main sections. They have to be hand machined. There is a fine tuning mechanism that I designed out of a fence strainer.
clatterbox: How are the fences amplified?
Rose: Just piezos and a PA. Loud.
clatterbox: How do you use the video footage being screened above the performers. Is it live footage or pre-recorded material from other sites and performances?
Rose: It’s all live footage – a specialist in this field has worked on this.
clatterbox: Have you provided specific performance instructions or score to the Kronos Quartet, or will the performance be largely improvised?
Rose: There are specific instructions, techniques, signals, it is a piece. There were written out sections to experiment with, then we cut it down to the possible and left out the improbable. It is very hard for string players to come to a new instrument with little previous experience – we worked within limitations of time & skill.
clatterbox: Is playing fences part of a wider fascination with finding the hidden sounds within structures?
Rose: I think you answered that with the question.
clatterbox: How do you see new musical instrument building in the context of contemporary music making? Is there room for musical inventiveness?
Rose: I’ll never get through all the ideas I have in my note books in my lifetime, but looking around I see most musicians happy to stay in their comfort zone whether it be an orchestra, a jazz group, or behind a laptop. I think every musician should have to at least try and make a musical instrument as part of their training. Making and playing instruments in almost the same breath was the backbone to having a musical society – which we clearly do not have anymore.
clatterbox: Anecdotally, do you think more musicians are creating their own instruments to make music with?
Rose: Well there are a lot more musicians in the world now in the area that you might call ‘experimental music’ than there were 30 or 40 years ago, simply because there are a lot more people on Earth, and there are also dozens of people who have come out of art courses where there is a sound component. So there are probably more in number who mess with materials in their back yards. On the other hand there are limits to a finite world of diminishing resources as we are all discovering, musician or not.
May 2009
Further information, including an audio interview with Kronos Quartet’s David Harrington, can be found at Jon Rose’s website