Jon Rose and Erik Griswold are two of Australia’s foremost improvising experimentalists.
Renowned internationally for all sorts of wide-ranging new music projects: from composing for orchestras to environmental explorations, such as Rose’s project The Great Fences of Australia and Griswold’s internationally renowned work creating The Piano Mill in Stanthorpe QLD, this more recent endeavour places very specific limitations on their performances. Unnamed Road, engages two violins: one an amplified tenor violin, and keyboards — a regular piano and a MIDI keyboard hooked up to samples of prepared piano.
How would you describe the music? Jon and Erik’s way of playing together is often described as free improvisation. A definition of free improvisation is just as difficult to delineate as a definition of music itself, but the methodology does seem to have some consensus.
In general, practitioners of improvised music do not improvise over the structures and harmonies of a tune, they tend to use their own personal languages of musical expression developed over decades of experience and knowledge. They enjoy the spontaneity of interaction; they live in and for the moment, and, as the nature of music itself suggests, the sonic events arrive and just as suddenly disappear into the ether. This kind of music has also been described as instant composition. At the beginning there is nothing, and at the end of the playing, both performers and audience return to that state of nothing. There may be a recording, but there are no objects left hanging on the wall as in a gallery.
Jon and Erik think of their collaboration as a road trip with the view and reaction constantly changing: from quiet contemplation to rhythmic exchanges, from dark lyricism to dense pointillism. The music however does tend to cohesion and structure, with ideas flowing from one idea to the next. Then again, just as a conversation in the car, there may be a sudden change of subject, or a stop altogether… for no apparent reason.
This year Jon Rose marks his 75th birthday and more than 50 years of working in Australia with his debut at Phoenix Central Park, having very recently been awarded the hallowed Richard Gill Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music at the 2025 APRA Art Music Awards. He shares the award jointly with his wife, Hollis Taylor, a zoomusicologist and composer and a violinist.
Erik Griswold returns to Phoenix having performed at the third STRATA festival curated by Laurence Pike, with Helen Svoboda and Chloe Kim as Anatomical Heart.