If the two previous volumes The Pink Violin and Violin Music in the Age of Shopping upset, confused, and entertained the music industry and cultural commentators, rosenberg 3.0, through a series of allegorical and insightful articles, will help ease the pain as practitioners of music scratch their heads working out their next survival move. This new book is the very final volume in as weird and twisted a trilogy of cultural critique as you are ever likely to encounter.
rosenberg 3.0 is a pseudonymous violin arcana compiled by Jon Rose from an extremely diverse array of musicians, fans and eccentrics, all deriving from the activities of the late lamented virtuoso Dr Johannes Rosenberg. The great man's suicide in Australia's Tanami Desert in 1992 has not stopped the torrent of all things Rosenberg, and the new volume draws upon the archives of the Rosenberg Museum in the town of Violin (in Slovakia) to offer the reader a compendium of artefact, irony, and dysfunction including: a single-use computer made of stone, the Islamic violin, an investigation into the genre of Violin Metal, a warning to the world about the Learned Elders of Viol, a photo essay of inappropriate and iconic violin usage from the museum archives, a tour through the Sydney suburb of Roselands in search of live music, a high tech breakthrough used in recordings of violin music from the 16th century, the exercise of power and plagiarism through music, the decline of the jazz venue, the rise of bio-technology and the violin, the transgressions of contemporary composers, extensive definitions of music in the 21st century, and various other musicological diversions (such as the origin of the wheeling goat) accompanied by a huge cast of Dr Rosenberg's extended family, many of whom bear the same initial, J.