Jon Rose - Life As A Musician In East Germany

Experimental violinist Jon Rose recalls the Kafka-esque conditions of being a musician in East Germany, which partly inspired his later shift to bowing fences as enormous musical instruments. "In 1986, I was living right on the Berlin Wall," Jon once explained to me, "and there were these wooden steps outside my front door that led up to some viewing towers. Every day, I'd go out and look over the wall into this incredible no-man's-land between East and West Berlin, a barbed wire entanglement filled with anti-tank stuff and goon towers of the East German police and border patrols. It was an extreme existentialist experience looking at this amazing border between ideas and systems, even though all the people involved share the same language. You couldn't play that fence very easily without getting shot."
This video was shot during production of Steve Elkins' feature documentary THE REACH OF RESONANCE at the March 2009 Rosenberg Exhibition in Brno, Czech Republic. However, none of it was used in the film.
To stream THE REACH OF RESONANCE: vimeo.com/ondemand/resonance
For a deeper dive behind the scenes: www.steveelkins.net/Cinema/Th...
For more on Jon Rose: www.steveelkins.net/Interview...