John Rodgers Obituary by Leah Cotterell

L-R John in Dubrovnik; Photo by Cris Osborne for "A Rose is a Rose"; John by Chris Osborne; John with Tell Heaven 2012 by Hillary Green; John 2019 by Mark Crocker

John Francis Rodgers was born 20 November 1962 in Millmerran, Western Queensland, and died on 21 December 2024 in Melbourne. John was one of Australia’s most original and productive creators, as a musician, composer and artist.

1.    Walking lightly

In a meeting to plan John Rodgers’ memorial, Paul Grabowsky described John as “unique in the world”. He insisted this was no exaggeration. John was a genius and a polymath.

In his prime John Rodgers had collaborated with an extraordinary range of musicians, gaining mastery of what he called the inner “games” of musical styles from flamenco guitar to classical violin and Carnatic music. With his close collaborators he had developed novel methods and practices, rigorously analysing music systems, and spontaneously applying his insights in improvisation. And from his first efforts he found his own distinctive voice, writing songs for and about community that could generate powerful emotional connections with an audience.  All of these facets in his work reflected a generous humanism that was John’s most important creation - claiming complete personal artistic freedom, only ever tempered by a desire for meaningful connection.

Paul also shared his view that John’s unique approach to music was grounded in his early life in Far North Queensland. John agreed.

In North Queensland, the physical nature of existence is relentless, in your face, and beautiful … Because nothing is ever the same, you have to live an improvised life, adjusting and shifting all the time in your response to what’s going on in the environment. And then there’s the whole outdoor life that you love when you are a child—smells and textures and things that break open. There isn’t the separation between your body and the natural world the way I imagine there would be, for instance, in the cities. As a consequence, you get to know your body—and what it’s capable of—well. (Neil, 2010)

John had little interest in pursuing cultural influence. His most prestigious commissions were earned entirely by his astonishing talents and innovations. Comparing the chaotic musical life of J.S. Bach to that of his first great influence, the itinerant Flamenco teacher Joachim Gomez, John said that both of them “walked lightly on the earth and left very few footprints” (Neil, 2010).

That also described John.

This obituary seeks to trace those light footsteps. The source material has been drawn from John’s own telling of his creative life in a 2010 interview with Linda Neil in the journal Extempore. It also draws on an interview with Robert Davidson in Real Time (2000) about the composition of Inferno. Along with some unpublished academic writing by John and a handful of media reviews and articles, most of the information has been gathered from his family, friends and collaborators, including the author who was a long-time friend.

John Rodgers was very happy to be walking lightly in the world, usually barefoot. His direction in life and music was always onwards to the next interesting idea. Trusting himself to respond to any environment, John was always ready, poised, to take full advantage of any lucky break.

2.    Achievements

John Rodgers’ achievements are impressive, and diverse.  This first section outlines selected works that speak to the breadth and impact of his creative practice. The following sections explore turning points that shaped John’s creative life, how John synthesised the breadth of his knowledge and experience, and how he made practical use of his gifts.

John first made his mark as a classical violin prodigy, then as a composer of art music with commissions for instrumental works from the Australian Art Orchestra, the Elision Ensemble, the London Sinfonietta, and the Brodsky Quartet, among others. He contributed dozens of music scores for theatre, dance and opera productions, as well as arts and music festivals. Beyond the prestige arts, John was a creative driver of long-lived bands and art music ensembles. He joyfully added his might to anarchic cabaret and fringe theatre works.

From pushing the boundaries of improvisation to writing moving ballads for a stage musical, in every setting, whatever the challenge, John could always find an ideal musical solution. John wore his influences lightly, because they had been so thoroughly digested.

Classical violin

John burst onto the classical music scene at age 19 as the leader of the Queensland Youth Orchestra (QYO, 1981) then leading the Australian Youth Orchestra (AYO, 1983-1984). His performances of Bach, Brahms and Bartok are remembered for their intensity and expressive freedom.  In early 1982 John took over from another violinist in the Ambrosian Quartet with Warwick Adeney (violin), Brett Dean (viola), and John Napier (cello). John Napier described their predominantly German repertoire as fairly limited and conservative, “Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Shostakovich, Tintner, Bartok, Webern … but there is a time when as a classical musician you learn your trade, This was then” (Napier, 2025). By the time John graduated from the Conservatorium, doubts about playing the music of “dead men” led him to reject a scholarship opportunity to study in Europe (Achay, 2025). Seen in retrospect, the space he claimed for himself was necessary to finding his voice as a composer and a creative force.

The alternative

After spending time in Newcastle and Melbourne with Linda Neil, a fellow free spirit who encouraged him to compose, John formed the punk band Choo Dikka Dikka (named for the sound of pedestrian crossings) with Adam Nash and  Martin Mackerras. Martin said that John was influenced by Talking Heads and James Brown, becoming an excellent rhythm guitar player. He was also writing with Adam and Linda, and on his own, bringing new songs to rehearsal every week. Moving back to Brisbane, Choo Dikka Dikka is still remembered for the satirical punk song, Cyclone Hits Expo (1988). Martin said that even while they were working on this song, John, in collaboration with his friend Eugene Gilfedder, was composing an orchestral work to be played at Expo 88. “I remember him writing it in a house where there was much partying going on but he would just sit up all night in a corner at a desk in the sitting room and just write it” (Mackerras, 2025).

John was active in West End’s cabaret and band scene falling into many formative friendships across theatre, music and art, and meeting his wife Mellissa Bone, a visual artist who strongly influenced his creative outlook. It was Mellissa who introduced John to singer Pearly Black. Pearly remembers meeting John in 1990 at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) after a performance of the satirical ToadShow entertainer, Sherwoodstock. People still talk about John, wearing a vintage frock and hoop earrings, with a borrowed white electric violin, playing a searing solo on All Along the Watchtower.

John’s creative partnership with Pearly resulted in the band, Madam Bones Brothel. For “The Brothel” John wrote dozens of songs based on the events of his life, characters in his neighbourhood, and news stories outrageous enough to tickle his lively sense of the ridiculous.  These were recorded by John and Pearly on their two albums, Family of Abjects (1994) and Fleas on the Bitch (1999).

In 2004, Pearly and their friend, Leah Cotterell, produced The Ultimate Prize, a retrospective of Madam Bones Brothel repertoire and John’s songs for theatre, presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse in the Queensland Cabaret Festival program. Madam Bones Brothel continued to perform in Brisbane and Melbourne until 2010.

New music

In the fields of experimental and improvised music John produced important works and enjoyed long collaborations. In 1994 John became a founding member of the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO), contributing virtuosic performances and forming strong musical collaborations with Paul Grabowsky, Scott Tinkler and other musicians in the ensemble. John’s compositions for the AAO include “Finale” for Passion (1997), addressing themes from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and Moras (2000) a collaboration with the Sruthi Laya Carnatic Ensemble. John was the Associate Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra in 2005.

In the late 1990s John made his first instrumental recording, A Rose is a Rose (1997).  The works were written for, and with, collaborators, including the bass clarinettist Anthony Burr with whom he later created The Mizler Society (AAO, 2002). John described this as “a burlesque on early modern music theory”.  Teasingly, John said The Mizler Society was an attempt to find the best possible solution to the end of the Art of Fugue by J.S. Bach, and the 74-page program accompanying the event asserted that their goal was “the rescue of Music from its unlawful custodians and its subsequent restoration to its rightful place among the Sciences” (Rodgers & Burr, 2002). John told Linda, “I made a lego-mindstorms robotic duck as my part of it and Anthony Burr gave lectures on the topic for those interested at the Melbourne Museum” (Rodgers, 2020).

In 1998 he composed Carolling for the ensemble Perihelion,

Carolling is an attempt to respect and rejoice in birdsong. To listen to it in wonder. And in so doing to wonder what it is, to try to analyse and grasp the untouchable. Birds have two larynxes and a pitch range that surpasses the capacity of any human instrument prior to digital technologies. (Rodgers, n.d.)

In 2000 John’s composition Inferno (Elision Ensemble) was included in the program of the Adelaide Festival.  “Members of the ensemble take on the personalities of various denizens of hell and a visual landscape evokes the hellish images of Hieronymous Bosch with invented instruments such as the 'ice-flute' and 'water-crotales'” (Gallusch, 2000). This was the beginning of a run of commissions exploring big ideas via radical and original approaches including TULP: the body public (Elision Ensemble, 2004). “TULP is a revelation - a confronting, sometimes unbearably intimate collage of what it means to be human” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2004).

For Genevieve Lacey, John composed two multi-phonic solos for recorder, and then a suite of ever-expanding birds (from 2004). Another important collaborator, Erkki Veltheim, is a classically trained violinist and viola player, singer and improviser. They met in 1996 when Erkki was playing John’s music in a production of A Cheery Soul. Erkki and John devised two experimental music theatre works for QPAT's Merivale St Theatre, Kill Music and Let Sounds Live! (2001) and Kill Art and Let Feelings Live! (2002).

In 2010 John was commissioned by Paul Grabowsky to compose a new work for The London Sinfonietta to perform at The Adelaide Festival. The result was Glass, a musical reflection on the rich sounds captured by John and Ken Edie by the scraping of objects on glass, featuring the improvised solo trumpet of Scott Tinkler.

Hear Me and Remember  was commissioned for the Four Winds Festival in 2012 by artistic director, Genevieve Lacey. The lyrics were adapted by Leah Cotterell from a Corsican lament, U Lamentu di Ghjesu. Hear Me and Remember was performed by singer Lou Bennet, with a cello quartet, John on flamenco-inspired continuo guitar, and the two didgeridoos of William Barton and Mark Atkins, who played together for the first time in this piece. Hear Me and Remember was later reworked for string quartet for the Adelaide Festival 2019. John’s final commission was Failure of Communication (2015), one among a collection of new songs based on the poetry of Judith Wright, for Katie Noonan and The Brodsky Quartet.

Theatre music

John provided musical direction and compositions for 40 theatre productions overall. John’s work with Neil Armfield began with A Cheery Soul (1992) for the Queensland Theatre Company (QTC). John worked on Neil’s productions at Belvoir Street and the Malthouse including Exit the King (2007-2009), which won the 2007 Sydney Theatre Award for Best Score. Exit the King was produced on Broadway starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon in 2009 and John was also musical consultant on Neil’s film Candy (2006) starring Heath Ledger.

John’s work with Wesley Enoch also began in 1992 with Radiance (QTC). John was especially proud of the songs he wrote with Wesley for The Sunshine Club (1999-2000). The Sunshine Club told the story of an Aboriginal soldier returned from WWII defying racist systems by creating a non-segregated dance club. It was commissioned by Robyn Nevin for the QTC with Nick Enright as an adviser. After a brief North Queensland tour it opened in Brisbane in 1999, then in Sydney for the STC in 2000. The show boosted the careers of many young artists including Wesley, David Page, Ursula Yovich and Elaine Crombie (Pinne, 2015). QTC ran a revival season of The Sunshine Club in 2022 and from 2022 to 2024 it toured regional Australia.

John Rodgers’ music with its upbeat dance tunes have the jive, bunny hop and ballroom dancing steps of the period at their core. The songs have a jazz swing and rhythm to them, with some memorable tunes, not least the title song, ‘The Sunshine Club’, full of hope and joy, and the yearning finale, ‘If Not Now Then When?’ (Conway, 2022)

In 2010 John created a haunting Helpmann Award nominated score for the Expressions Dance Company production, Where the Heart Is, choreographed by Natalie Weir and showcasing the musicianship of his frequent collaborators, Pearly Black, Erkki Veltheim, and Marc Hannaford. It had a return production in 2012 with Christa Powell on violin. John was musical director of Zen Zen Zo’s Cabaret (2011) at the QPAC, musical creator and player on the QTC’s Elizabeth: Almost by chance a Woman (2012), and performed in Annie Lee’s Dangling my Tootsies (2013) at the Powerhouse.

Queensland Music Festival

John made a series of contributions to community projects for the Queensland Music Festival (QMF). Bob Cat Dancing (2003), directed by Sean Mee and produced by Seamus Mee, was warmly embraced by the Mt Isa community. Played on a massive stage constructed by moving tons of earth in the dry river bed, it featured twirling bob cats and a cage for the band framed by two 30-tonne excavators that performed a rumbling pas de deux during the romantic duet The Other Side of You. John’s songs were fresh, catchy and country and featured the bell-like voice of 18-year old Megan Sarmardin. It was followed up with a sequel, Bob Cat Magic (2005) with Megan again playing a featured role. For the 2007 Innisfail community project, Dream Catchers, Megan again worked with John and Pearly, along with William Barton, Genevieve Lacey and flamenco singer Manolo Varela. This was John’s lush meditation on flamenco music and the unique Spanish heritage of Paronella Park, a concrete castle built by hand in the rainforest.

John, with producer Leah Cotterell, went on to mentor Megan in the development of Little Birung, a suite of emotive songs telling the story of four generations of her proud North Queensland Indigenous family. In partnership with Jute Theatre, the performance debuted at the Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair (2010), was co-presented by the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Brisbane (2011) and toured regional North Queensland (2013).

2013

In 2013 John was involved with four Indigenous performance projects. In June, John composed and provided musical direction for the QTC production, Mother Courage and Her Children, an inspired and Indigenous Australian reimagining of Bertolt Brecht’s classic tale. In July he was musical director BIGhART’s Hipbone Sticking Out which included time spent working with community in the Pilbara town of Roebourne. Hipbone Sticking Out was the third work in the Namatjira and Ngapartji Ngapartji trilogy – the back story of the death of John Pat at age 16 in a WA police cell in 1983, the death that launched the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. In October, for the Melbourne Festival, John was musical director of Malthouse’s The Shadow King, an indigenous retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear transposed by Balang T.E. Lewis and Michael Kantor to an Aboriginal community in Australia’s North.  And in November, John was the musical director of Ngangwurra means heart, a visual music theatre collaboration between the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Black Arm Band. Ngangwurra means heart presented seven new musical works performed in five Aboriginal languages by 30 artists including Emma Donovan and Lou Bennett. The performance explored themes about misconceptions and myths of Aboriginal people at seven important moments in the history of Aboriginal Australia: Before, Touched, Ngangwurra, Us, Survival, Beyond and Freedom.

In Brisbane in 2013, with collaborator Sandro Colarelli, John worked on Madame Carandini’s Musical Curiosity Show the story of Christie Palmerston, the first European to traverse the rainforests of Far North Queensland. For this show John brought together the didgeridoo of Mark Atkins with musical novelties including a glass harmonica. John was also pursuing projects on his own initiative in 2013. With film maker Randall Wood, he continued the creative development of 8,000 Balustrades, returning again to the story of Jose Paronella. With Robert Perrier, he co-produced the Life and Music series (QPAC, QTIX and UQ). This program filmed conversations and music performances with some of John’s friends, and Australia’s finest musicians, including William Barton, Genevieve Lacey, Scott Tinkler, Vanessa Tomlinson, Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall. John also toured Australia with Kate and Keir, becoming fast friends.

3.    Turning points

This section focuses on significant turning points in the development of John’s artistry.

Timing and context are everything, and events can seem so random, I became a musician because of some highly unlikely coincidences, Change just one of them and who knows? I would say that my character trait of being bewitched by new things and walking away from old ones is far more intrinsic than my 'musicalness’… (Neil, 2010)

The tropics

John was born in 1962 to Eileen and Phil Rodgers in Millmerran, Queensland. His big sister Anne was five, and little sister Paula completed the family two years later. When Paula was a baby, Phil was transferred to Cooktown as Clerk of the Court. Life in the far North was easy-paced and casual, and the children enjoyed outdoor fun and freedom.

Anne described her favourite photo of John aged four.

In the photo, he has launched himself off a bridge; his arms are outstretched, he has a big smile on his face, and he looks like he is flying. For me, that image encapsulates John’s life: he was constantly launching himself into projects, propelled by excitement, and not quite sure how and where he would land.

Anne also described John’s delight in the absurd, his lack of self-consciousness.

His games were the most fun, his stories were the most hilarious, and his zest for life was infectious. He could often be heard banging out a rhythm on a drum in the back yard and singing his favourite song: ‘I hope you’ll come and see me in the movies. They’re gonna make a big star out of me!’

His first music teacher in Cooktown, Joyce Crooks, taught piano and John happily recalled the two of them with their heads together trying to work out how to play violin from a beginners text book. He reminisced about the DIY music making in the North, and his thoughts about transplanted cultures would inspire later works. John told Linda Neil, “I still feel most at home in the presence of things that remind me of North Queensland. I'm still making it up as I go along, still changing my mind, still trying new things”.

Flamenco

When the family moved to Ayr, an hour and a half south of Townsville, the Rodgers kids kept up their piano lessons. To inspire their musical pursuits, Phil bought tickets to a concert by a Spanish duo. John was entranced by the guitar. Then his mother heard a radio report about flamenco guitar lessons being offered by maestro Joachim Gomez. Flamenco lessons began when John was nine years old.

It was an amazing experience as a young Queensland boy to encounter such an exotic person - musically speaking, as well as in terms of his lifestyle. He was also the first actual full-time musician I had met, as well as being the first person I had encountered who could really play, who had mastery over his instrument. I was nine, and I did dream of being one of these people, like Gomez. Flamenco music was also the first music was I really obsessed with. (Neil, 2010)

John came to see flamenco as “…a musical game with strict rules” (Neil, 2010). For John, internalising those rules meant practising exercises from cassette recordings of the three-hour lessons Gomez gave in the back room of a music shop in Townsville. Phil recorded the lessons because they never knew if, and when, Gomez would return.

There was a moment when John thought that he would become a flamenco musician.

One night Gomez … turned up at our house with his son Juan and a car full of his possessions. It was obvious he was about to leave town, this time probably permanently. During the dinner, Gomez told my parents that he wanted to take me to Madrid so I could study flamenco guitar. I thought: “This is it! This is the now direction of my life!” l had it all planned at 11! Understandably, my parents rejected his request. After that Gomez and Juan drove off into the night and I thought, There is my future and it's heading away from me! Who knows what life would be like if I had gone? (Neil 2010)

These years also saw the beginning of the hardest chapter in the Rodgers’ family life as Paula was diagnosed with leukaemia. Paula’s illness required medical treatments, sometimes as far away as Melbourne, to give her the best possible outcome. In the midst of Paula’s treatment, Phil began his last job as a Magistrate of Redcliffe Courts.

Alongside caring for Paula, Eileen and Phil nurtured John’s growing love of the violin. He made rapid progress and had fond memories of his Catholic School music teacher, Sister Winifred.

She conducted the Peninsula Schools orchestra, which also had a Big Band influence with the usual unbalanced mix of instruments. I think it had five flutes, 10 clarinets, a couple of string players and a cello and a bass. I wrote a piano concerto for myself to play with that combination. Oddly enough, the concerto was a mixture of flamenco and Beethoven.

Paula was laid to rest in 1976 when John was 14 years old, an experience of grief that his friends believe contributed to the emotional range of his creative works.

Vocation

In Brisbane, John was talent-spotted trying out a violin in a music shop by Gary Williams, principal cellist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and from the age of 15 he attended classes at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, learning from Dr Anthony Doheny and later John Curro, the founder of the Queensland Youth Orchestra. “By the end of grade ten I realised that I wanted to be a musician which, at that time, meant being a classical violin player”. Joining the orchestra at the age of 16 was a powerful experience.

I'd never played with a bunch of musicians that good. To me classical music sounds the best if you’re actually playing in it, something about being enveloped in the sound. Going to a concert is never as good as playing in it. When you go to the concert it’s not as loud… (John Rodgers, 2020)

In the years 1981-1984 when John was leading first the QYO and then the AYO, he was practicing up to eight hours a day to master this new game. Tall and thin with a mop of dark curly hair, his body adapted to the rigour of this regime leaving John with a distinctive egg shaped goitre on his neck, which kept company with his mobile Adam’s apple.

… during that time I had the opportunity to play the great concertos of the classical repertoire. I discovered to my surprise that l had some ability, which helped me again to work out the game - which, in that context, meant knowing how to work hard and become good at something. (Neil, 2010)

For John in this period, the most intensely felt musical pleasure arose through playing with the Ambrosian Quartet. His friend John Napier has said that “…people still contact me to tell of the influence that concerts and rehearsals had on them in their formative years”. When people tell stories about John’s classical violin performances they are often accompanied by amusement about his disinterest in social conventions –  illustrated by his choice during the AYO European tour of 1984 to refuse to wear shoes.

No. I didn't like to wear shoes. And that kind of defined me as a classical musician: the only time I wore shoes was when I had to do a classical music concert. Otherwise, coming from the deep North, it didn't make much sense to wear shoes! (Neil, 2010)

John felt himself to be an outsider in the conservative middle class milieu of the Conservatorium. On graduating, he confounded the expectations of teachers, peers and family. He told Linda, “It was serious stuff. I received a German scholarship to study in Berlin, but I'd been having misgivings about it for some time and ended up turning it down.” John Napier reflected,

… the world is full of wonderful string quartets, and even as far back as 1984 did not need another one. Our world is richer for the alternative life that John led. The curious thing is that had John stayed on the quartet path, that part of our world would be richer for the genius he would have brought.

Freedom

Considered in retrospect, the freedom John claimed for himself, his drive to explore wider horizons, was essential to finding his voice as a composer and a creative force.

By this point I had begun to realise that, notwithstanding whatever else I understood about my musical development, it certainly seemed to be subject to change and divergences that required adaptability to the sudden and sometimes extreme shifts in environment and focus. (Neil, 2010)

From the springboard of punk band Choo Dikka Dikka, the Brisbane alternative scene offered John fertile ground for all sorts of edgy musical and social experiments. Like a human sponge he absorbed classic pop genres, playing jazz with Trevor Hart’s Black Cat Circle and country with Robert Moore and David McCormack's COW before jumping in to songwriting adventures with Madam Bones Brothel. Pearly Black said of those days, “We explored with a voracious freedom, answering to nothing other than our youthful ideals of truth and passion” (Pearly Black, 2025). 

John told Linda Neil,

When no real chance of money is involved, your motivations are purer and less complicated. So, as I said, this musical adventure features the developing story of my interest in songwriting and, of course, improvisation, which featured very strongly in Madam Bones Brothel. With respect to the band experience, what I came to know and love was that you could make songs that care from nothing more or less than your life, from the world you were in, and the people around you. (Neil, 2010)

The songs John wrote for Madam Bones Brothel were wholly original in their combinations of lyrics and music. Czechoslovakia, begins as a rousing beer hall folk ballad, and as the story unfolds, we realise it is about a necrophile accidentally reviving a corpse, confusing and disgusting but strangely inoffensive when sung by Pearly. At the climax it is all clanking chains and thickly layered, increasingly dissonant repeating vocal cries. Haunting and bitter sweet, Seven has a modulating verse form in 7/8 delivering a series of exaggerated portraits of characters living in and around John’s neighbourhood in Highgate Hill.

In 1992 John’s son Viv Bone was born and while he was still a baby, John and Mellissa moved to Melbourne, joining Pearly and their friend Miffi Maxmillion to form a household in which conversations about philosophy and literature were at the centre of domestic life. Drawing on the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John wrote the climactic flamenco song, The Ultimate Prize.

Pearly reflected,

I did an intense handful of years of on-the-job training in a wildly diverse eclectic range of music, was constantly challenged to stretch my skills, and it all happened at such a rapid pace that I never had time to do anything but hang on for the ride. I have come to think of it as being in a weird and wonderful alternative Conservatorium … He was an utterly ecstatic musician and every time I was on stage with him was like all my musical dreams coming true. (Pearly Black, 2025)

In 1994 John moved back to Brisbane, in part because he wanted Viv to have the freedom to play outdoors. John and Mellissa separated several years later and continued to co-parent Viv.

Pearly worked with John on a string of musical projects including Dream Catchers and Where the Heart Is and John told Linda Neil, “... from those humble and very raw beginnings developed a 20-year through-line of working in collaboration with a vocal artist has also led to serious compositions” (Neil, 2010).

Experiments

While John was up-cycling pop music for Madam Bones Brothel, he was also exploring the frontiers of art music with like-minded classical players, especially Anthony Burr, and with Artisan’s Workshop, a quartet with jazz musicians Jon Dimond (bass) and Elliot Dalgleish (saxophone), forming an especially close bond with drummer Ken Edie. Later John would describe his realisation that Ken was doing something entirely new.

 I had never heard anyone play such complex rhythms so in time or such contrasting layers thought of so musically and delivered with such control and authority. This was purely rhythmic polyphony that had nothing to do with fugues. And this was because Ken is a drummer. (Rodgers, 2009)

Here was a new game.

At that time I wasn't really in the mood for what would be called ‘serious contemporary music’ I wanted to play music that would make sense to people in my environment, while Elliot, Ken and Jonathan, for their own reasons, were making music that deliberately didn't make a lot of sense, except possibly to jazz aficionados. What did strike me about the possibilities it presented to me was that, though I had learned to play the violin well, they were practising things that I hadn't yet learned how to do. So there was a new game to play and understand and a new set of skills to learn. Improvisers of that quality are constructing a language while they train themselves, and it struck me that this was an interesting thing to do. Embarking on this musical adventure was also, I suppose, a connection back to classical music, in that I thought I could practise something new while at the same time observing myself getting better. (Neil, 2010)

Reflecting on his explorations with John, Anthony Burr wrote:

At the beginning we played with Ken Edie as a trio, trying to explore some completely alien idea of what might be feasible as music … John’s violin playing at this time was genuinely astonishing (perhaps even more so with 30 years of hindsight). But what was most inspiring was his honesty and humility as a musician: things that were apparent in all of his endeavours from the bleeding edge avant-garde pieces through to the pop songs. He’s always been both looking to hear something that wasn’t there before (which means acknowledging up front that you don’t know what you’re doing), and wanting to take the time to hear and learn other people's musics. Lastly, for John, the people around him are key. I’ve never worked with anyone who did more to make their collaborators feel engaged and empowered. All of his work is marked by this real generosity of spirit, and that is really something rare. (Burr, 2025)

John embraced Ken’s interest in the harmonic and rhythmic methods of Elliott Carter. This became the next musical system he set out to master. Composer Elliott Carter was a polymath, a mathematician and a classics scholar. Ken explained that Carter’s work was rigorous, based on an exhaustive mathematical analysis of harmonic processes, identifying all permutations of 12 tone octaves including any and all special harmonic relationships, as well as pioneering possibilities for pivoting the centre of the rhythmic pulse, via “metric modulation”. What John and Ken admired was that Carter was using thorough research to produce music. They were excited by the idea that some features of that music were beyond human hearing. Their response to the challenge was to work even harder.

So began a long period of informal practical research listening to and studying relevant music, and practising subdivisions, polyrhythms, groupings and patterns and getting computer programs written to figure out more and figuring out how to make music with them. (Neil, 2010)

John described an ever-evolving process of discovery,

… a number of my friends have somewhat obsessive personalities, For instance, Ken. Anthony Burr and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the compositional ideas of Elliott Carter in an improvised language. That's hard. I'm always amazed to think that I was introduced to Carter by a jazz drummer. As a part of this project I felt I'd like to try writing some notated pieces for us to play as well, something I would not have predicted five years earlier. I remember sitting up late in a house in Melbourne, with a young baby asleep in the next room, figuring out this arcane music and wondering what had happened to me. (Neil, 2010)

Their experimentation also went to deconstructions of musical sounds and instruments.

We certainly made new sounds. Ken, for instance, was at that time into playing with junk rather than drums. But he is such a precise and detailed character that he made very particular refined sounds from the junk he was playing with … he played other unusual objects such as a hot water system, bullet shell encasings, everything from vibrating pieces of steel to using wire brushes on bits of metal in a very particular rhythm so you get millions of ting sounds as the brushes move very slowly back and forth. He also used strips of aluminium frames From window panes and a variety of metal trash as well as rocks and stones--that you can get from junkyards. (Neil, 2010)

By the time John Shand reviewed a 2010 concert by The Antripodean Collective for the Sydney Morning Herald, John’s improvisational practice had drawn the diverse threads of all these music systems into a tight woven whole,

The Antripodean Collective stands in the forefront of the world's improvisers. Melburnians Marc Hannaford (piano) and Scott Tinkler (trumpet) and Brisbanites John Rodgers (violin) and Ken Edie (drums) enjoy shared harmonic and rhythmic conceptions and vocabularies. They freely draw on the Indian concept of rhythm cycles and combine this with the American classical composer Elliott Carter's pioneering work on metric modulation … Edie is unique among drummers. Here he spent more time silent than playing, itself a vital musical decision, lending drama to his every entry. Then he offered fragments of a groove, or jolting punctuations applied with extraordinary precision, given the obliqueness of the prevailing rhythmic information … Rodgers also sat out much of the time. His playing on a duet with Hannaford was stunningly beautiful even as it maintained an icy austerity. (Shand, 2010)

4.    Synthesis

As John mastered the rules of each new game, he organised his discoveries into a unique musical vocabulary that encompassed Bach fugues, flamenco, Elliott Carter’s musical mathematics, Carnatic music systems, Mt Isa’s juke boxes and Blind Dog Donny playing blues in the back bar of the old Boundary Hotel. He could elegantly reconstitute these materials through the filter of his own strong artistic identity, and he had the headroom to mix things up in exciting new ways. But there was a thoughline - no matter the style or genre or context, from “icy austerity” to furious flamenco, they all bear his aesthetic fingerprint. You can hear John’s voice in everything he made, his clarity, ambition and soulfulness serving an ardent desire for connection.

Duende

John was sensitive to musical effects beyond notation or technical precision, probably because of his formative experience of flamenco and the flamenco concept of duende. John explained to Linda Neil,

Flamenco is really a cultural and social activity, whose laws are lived not codified- and are therefore second nature to people who grow up with the music in the south of Spain. Because I was experiencing it as a transplanted culture, I had to figure out the game and its rules- much the same way that jazz musicians have to be alert to the rules of their game. But what really appealed to me was the duende. Duende literally means 'elf’ but it really refers to some indefinable feeling in the flamenco experience, like when we say someone played or sang “soulfully” in gospel or jazz. (Neil, 2010)

John exuded and elicited volumes of indefinable feelings through his performances. John Napier wrote that John’s classical violin playing defied the cliché that classical musicians are constrained, suppressing their own creativity to channel the souls of others,

To listen to John play is to know that this is not just a cliché, but an untruth. What we aspire to is to create beauty, or if need be ugliness, and to comfort and discomfort our listeners (and ourselves), with what is added to, or between those indispensable dots. As a classical player, John was the dot perfectionist and the creative artist. (Napier, 2025)

Listening to Indian music, John heard and saw, deeper relationships in content and form.

When listening to these musics, particularly the music for percussion alone, one can almost see shapes expanding and contracting before one's eyes. This has been developing for centuries and is extremely sophisticated in both its material and the quality of its execution while involving improvisation. (Rodgers, 2009)

He admired South Indian music training for the value it placed on things that cannot be notated,

…even now the best way for these musicians to learn a song is to go and find someone who is connected to the musical lineage and get them to sing it to them, because they don't believe that notation can really tell you enough. (Neil, 2010)

In their collaboration, John and Ken compared Carter’s large-scale systemic processes to those of South Indian Carnatic music. John and Ken also compared Elliott Carter’s research-based approach to J.S. Bach’s comprehensive exploration of all the opportunities of fugue. John was attracted to the playfulness of Bach’s musical games (i.e. crab canons) noting that Carter also played musical games. And given that Carnatic musicians are able to improvise through large-scale structural features, Bach could improvise fugues and flamenco players work within rules to improvise music fresh in each performance, John and Ken decided to attempt to improvise across works created using Carter’s rigorous compositional methods. They wrote duets using Carter’s methods with the idea of playing through the forms like a jazz tune. It proved impossible, but this was real research. seeking to synthesise improvisatory practices and musical concepts drawn from pure maths.

Even with his outsized capacity for musical independence and abstract thought, far from looking down on untrained musicians or singers, John was interested in anyone who could communicate through music convincingly.

John loved singers for their soulfulness. He worked with singers in cabaret including Penny Arcade, Robyn Archer, Carol Lloyd, Christine Johnston, Annie Lee, Katrina Devery, Sandro Colarelli, and Carita Farrer. For his own pleasure, when gigging with his friends in the gospel revue Tell Heaven, John sang songs from the repertoire of Johnny Cash, admiring the gravitas and humour that Cash could convey. Applying himself to this particular task, John developed a small selection of vocal embellishments that he applied with quiet good taste. Tell Heaven was named in honour of the Staples classic I’m Coming Home and in performance this song was often preceded by John’s choice of a chorale from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The unusual combination of the stately chorale and the ecstatic gospel song speaks to John’s understanding of duende.

John would return to flamenco many times in his composition and songwriting. The Dream Catchers (QMF, 2007) brought together flamenco singing by Manolo Varela (another student of Joachim Gomez) with the voices of Pearly and Megan, flamenco guitar, didgeridoo, baroque recorder, violin, drums, and vibraphone. Performed outdoors at sunset in Innisfail, the music swung between surreal dreamscapes and searing flamenco. It was a celebration of John’s deep affection for Far North Queensland.

In 2011, forty years after he first took lessons with Gomez, John recorded The Uncaring Wind. This album brought together two major influences. Pearly explained,

The Uncaring Wind (Blows through the Bones of Human Endeavour) (2011) is where the two main streams of John’s musical being come together. It was deeply personal to him, and he laboured over it for months, weaving together his life-long loves of Bach and the flamenco that ignited his musical soul during childhood, into a unique hybrid. I wonder if this album is in fact the clearest expression of John’s inner musical self that we will ever hear. It certainly represents the two parts of him I saw most clearly: the ordered beauty of Bach that brings such peace to me, and the visceral, ecstatic immediacy of flamenco. Both musics are intricately complex, both require duende, and both can touch the face of God. John was never afraid to reach for that ultimate prize. (Pearly Black, 2025)

Big ideas

John also applied himself to the study of literature and philosophy. He told Robert Davidson (2000) that he was revelling in the intensity of The Oresteia and Oedipus Rex when he was commissioned to compose for the Elision Ensemble and Liza Lim suggested he read Dante’s Inferno. His preparation to compose Inferno included a weekly Dante reading group with housemate and classics scholar Murray Kane, Pr Dan O’Neill and Robert Davidson among others. John identified parallels between the philosophical basis of Dante’s writing, Carnatic music, the elaborate nature of western music, and Carter’s rhythmic systems. “I had just worked with South Indian musicians (Karikudi R Mani) who have a strong connection between philosophy, geometry, music, religion – they are all interrelated as they are in Dante” (Davidson, 2000). The finished composition wrestled with ideas about fundamental forces, pitch and distortion, time and motion, the relationship of notation and improvisation, and delivered a rendering of the symbols and spaces of hell into a “musical line” (Davidson, 2000).

John’s PhD project, The Passion of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, focused on the eldest son of J.S. Bach. Initially an outgrowth of The Mizler Society (2002), his AAO project with Anthony Burr, it deepened into a much more complex research project. 

Because most of his music is lost, all we have is the memory of his improvisation and the stories that have been passed down about him. And although he was an actual figure in musical history, he is also one of the mast fictionalised classical musicians of all. There have been fictional biographies, films and opera about his life that occupy a huge space in the German imagination and its attempts to understand itself. (Neil, 2010)

Writing about Friedemann’s story and the constructions that had been placed on his life over time, was another way for John to interrogate classical music. Anthony wrote:

Friedemann was a prodigious talent who didn’t quite make it as a composer during a time of wrenching social, intellectual and artistic change … For John the project was an opportunity to think through foundational questions about musical culture and society, a way to make sense of his own ambivalent history with classical and art music and a way to look back at history to find clues about how to navigate what he understood as a contemporary moment of significant change … Each iteration of his biography revealed more about the life and times of his biographers than they did of Friedemann. (Burr, 2025)

John told Linda Neil he was attempting to understand why he took up music in the first place, not to pick a fight with the music establishment, but rather “to understand why I find them so problematic. I think there is room for comment”, and he asked, “By what process did the mind/body split happen in the formulation of classical music?” (Neil, 2010). While Friedemann was J.S. Bach’s most talented and favourite son, he was also his greatest failure. This disjunction interested John greatly.

By the time he died he had given up trying to play the music game of the day … he still played organ concerts that were attended by people who raved about them. But, as history is usually written by the winners, he has all but disappeared from the written history of western classical music. (Neil, 2010)

By comparing the forces that shaped Friedemann’s outcomes to contemporary contexts, John was asking questions about music and the training of musicians. “… who produces it? Who pays for it? Who listens to it? What exactly is worth knowing? These are up for grabs, just as they were back then” (Neil, 2010). John described the pre-classical musician as having a more balanced approach to practical music, drawingparallels to his early experiences of classical and flamenco music in North Queensland.

Reading about music in the 18th-century does remind me of growing up in North Queensland--for one reason. because it was such a ramshackle bunfight! The schedule for Sebastian Bach when he was writing those five years of church music, for instance, was crazy, Performance-wise, it amounted to a couple of run-throughs and then on goes something like the St Matthew Passion, which he would have performed with mostly amateur musicians and singers. It must have been chaos. They were making it up as much as I was when I was a kid. And to be able to improvise fugues you would need to have played the necessary learning games quite obsessively, the way I cried to learn those Flamenco games from Gomez. And the squeezing out of improvisation from classical music implies a squeezing out of the body. (Neil, 2010)

John’s fluency as an improviser was an expression of his freedom from constraint and his confidence in his physical abilities, “In improvised music, the ideas of the mind really come from the body-from fingers, lips, lungs and limbs - not from abstractions” (Neil, 2010). He saw this as more central to his nature than his ability to master the techniques of each style.  “... I feel I’m more fundamentally an improviser than a musician.” He argued that turning away from pre-classical practices meant that improvisation had been excised from music training.

That's the tradition- that one plays the music of geniuses. And the improviser's ideas are almost always- not of genius. You have to figure our a way to live with ‘good enough' just like everyone else. Country musicians sound great playing music that’s ‘not of genius’. Another thing that has struck me more and more is that musical disciplines are more different from each other than we tend to think. I also noticed around this time a very obvious distinction between jazz musicians and classical musicians: classical musicians turn up on time and play late, and Jazz musicians turn up late and play on time. They are not really made to play together because they tend not to treat time as the same thing. Different trainings produce very different musicians. (Neil, 2010)

John’s critical distance from the establishment reflected the discoveries he made as a young person, bringing his physical confidence to mastering the use of instruments, and his thinking about the meaning embedded in their use. Writing from Berlin after John died, his friend from the Conservatorium Tim Florence said,

We first met each other in 1979 I think…He was 17 or so, I was 19 … we were both terribly interested in what the results of making all these sounds together through these tricky wooden and metal devices could possibly mean in the greater context of life and the universe. We never stopped talking about this, and John never stopped thinking about this and exploring this, which his multi-faceted life's work is glorious evidence of. (Tim Florence, 2025)

Balance

John’s critique of the music establishment also coalesced around the realisation that he wanted to make music for the world he lived in, rather than construct a world around the music.

I remember I was living with theatre people and punks in the sort of house where people were doing lots of different kinds of creative things. I realised I felt more comfortable and saw more exciting things in that world than in the world of classical music. (Neil, 2010)

This might have been the moment that John began to evolve the idea of balance in his musical output, seeking out relationships, collaborations, adventures and inventions relevant to both his personal and professional worlds. John’s output is so impressive when you think about the range of works that might be laid out on his dining table. On any given day John might be writing a salty song for Madam Bones Brothel, a sweet song for a play and an avant-garde instrumental work for an arts festival, all before heading out for the night to accompany a cabaret singer.

Theatre music often kept him afloat financially. The work was pleasant and he enjoyed the company of actors. He could quickly identify the thrust of dramatic works and draw out something to fit the moment, and he could make any performer look good. Pearly was astonished that for Dream Catchers John had taught 25 grade four students to sing one of flamenco's more challenging forms, an alegría, set over John Coltrane's Giant Steps changes. When she asked him how he got such a complex musical hybrid to work at all, let alone sound so delightfully  joyous and breezy, he replied,

“’Just don't tell them it's hard.’… He seemed to have faith in everyone's musical ability and led us all down wonderful paths that we would not have thought possible for us. Perhaps it was his unwavering faith in music itself and all we had to do was let it rub off on us when we were with him. (Pearly Black, 2025)

Preparing to compose the songs for Bob Cat Dancing, John travelled to Mount Isa with producer, Seamus Mee,

I suggested we go and have a look and he wanted to get a feel for the place. John had a genius plan for his community engagement strategy. We arrived there and over the next five days we visited every pub, club and venue in town, drinking, playing pool, running the juke boxes, and chatting with the locals. This made John very happy! (Seamus Mee, 2025)

The bonds John made in Mt Isa with community formed the basis of his mentorship of Megan Sarmardin. Megan wrote,

John was an incredible mentor, guide, and musical collaborator—someone my family and I deeply respected and loved. He was entrusted with our family stories, which he transformed into beautiful works of art—songs and music about the women in my family—that became Little Birung. He cared deeply, not just about the music, but about the stories that gave it life.

In Indigenous families and culture, where stories and songlines are woven into history, John sat with us. He listened. He asked questions—not to pry, but to truly understand. With care and respect, he captured history in time and living memory, preserving the voices of our past. A wordsmith with the rare gift of saying so much by saying so little. Over time, John became more than a collaborator—he became a true family friend.

John’s friendships were often based on the love of making and exploring music together. One of John’s closest friendships, with Erkki Veltheim, began as a mentorship.

We began to devise performance art pieces that were very much about that deconstructing and reconfiguring of heritage music … We did one particular performance of a piece we called "Kill music and let sound live” in which we strung up a whole family of string instruments--a cello, a viola, a violin and a baby violin- in front of a scrim so that they looked like people suspended in space. Strung up with black string against a black background, the instruments looked as if they were just hovering there, uneasily haunted by their past as antique collectable objects. There was a lot of Improvised music in that. (Neil, 2010)

In their deep dive into Elliott Carter’s methods, John and Ken attracted other curious, open-minded musicians. They were happy to share their workings. In his FaceBook post a few days after John died, Sam Pankhurst told the story of coming to see John when he was 14 in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the music of Messiaen and Ligeti.

Upon arriving at his house I was immediately taken by the stacks of sheet music and wine bottles and objects that were ash trays and also that Ken Edie was there.  As we were saying hi one of John's cats (Ripper?? Something like that) jumped down onto his upright piano and walked along it.  Ken laughed preemptively as John was compelled towards the piano and played back “exactly” what the cat had just plink plonked … I really don't know how to describe how surreal it was, it was like magic.  Anyway it turns that was a very normal thing for John to do I found out.

John and Ken proceeded to explain to young Sam why Messiaen and Ligeti were actually not all that interesting compared to Elliott Carter. “Their reasoning seemed really good to me and I became immediately obsessed … I just couldn't believe how much insight they had into the inner workings of these pieces.  Granular details and cosmic zoom outs” (Pankhurst, 2024, 24 December).

John and Ken also taught together at The Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. Katie Noonan said,

I clearly remember trying to learn ‘Viv’s bum dance’ and other similar pieces in John and Ken’s extended improvisation class at the Con ’97-99 and being completely intimidated yet totally inspired. Unlike other deep jazzers who have a bitter elitist condescension towards non-jazzers, John and Ken were the antithesis of this, and it was this welcoming albeit extraordinary virtuosic energy, that empowered me to think and sing more freely … I am extremely proud to have commissioned John's last piece - a setting of the Judith Wright poem aptly named ‘Failure of Communication’.  I remember when I presented the score to the world renowned Brodsky String Quartet in London in Jan 2016, the first violinist ’s response was similar to me learning 'Viv’s bum dance' - intimidated yet totally inspired. 

In the 2010s head of the jazz course, Louise Denson asked John to teach two violin players in the jazz stream,

One day he came to see me in my office about one of them whose musical progress was being impeded by a poor technical foundation. He suggested that I should ask in the classical area if one of the tutors would be willing to take him on for a while to address the issues. I was surprised to say the least, since John had the most natural, effortless fluidity to his technique, evident to anyone who had seen and heard him play. That, he said, was exactly the problem: because he had never experienced difficulties in understanding and mastering the physicality of playing the violin, he had never had to break it down and think about what he was doing. He felt he was not able to teach this aspect of musicianship.

In the local community, West End social entrepreneur, Judy Abernethy, told a story about a phone call she received from John. When he saw that she was presenting a series of cabarets in an ad hoc local venue, he offered to come to the opening and play Bach to people waiting in the entry queue. Perhaps this was John's way to make practical music – to be a balanced musician.

Thinking about night Gomez asked his parents for permission to take John to Madrid, John reflected on the intersection of his native temperament and happenstance in his life, “Who knows what life would be like if I had gone? I could have had a crisis about Spanish flamenco music, rather than the crisis I eventually had with classical music…” (Neil, 2010).

5.    Living with disability

By 2014 John had moved back to Melbourne and picked up old threads with friends there. But in May he contracted pneumococcal meningitis, and then cerebral vasculitis, which resulted in an extensive and severe Acquired  Brain Injury leaving him with significant cognitive, motor, and speech impairments.

John’s last romantic partner, Stephanie Blake, was also a close friend from their shared experience learning violin and playing together in youth orchestras as teenagers. John told Pearly that when he was first in hospital, undergoing months of medical treatments and rehab, he would wait every morning for  Stephanie to come.

Stephanie stepped up to become John’s main carer and advocate, supporting him to make his own decisions. John had extensive damage in parts of this brain responsible for executive functioning. As a result, he had memory difficulties and was unable to initiate, plan, and problem solve. This meant he was not able to initiate, collaborate or complete projects without ongoing assistance. In functional terms, John’s life as an professional musician and composer was over.

But John was still John, and he retained his creative abilities - Stephanie described her input as “all the bits of John’s brain that didn’t work so well anymore”. In 2015, with assistance from Stephanie, John contributed to the music for the STC production of King Lear with Neil Armfield directing and he wrote “Failure of Communication” for Katie Noonan’s Love and Fury album with the Brodsky String Quartet.

Restricted as he was, John must have missed not only his independence, but also the vibrant social life of an admired and celebrated artist. In 30 years of making music John had touched so many people (cue the raucous John laugh track). But it can be a struggle to accept the changed realities of a friend or loved one with an acquired disability. Attachment to the past can hinder people adapting to a friend’s new capacities and needs. Our lives run along with a certain inertia and John’s life had changed. Disability can be an isolating experience, for the person with disability and for their carers.

Needing assistance with every aspect of his life, John relied on others for help but he never seemed to feel shame about it. He accepted all assistance with grace and without ever complaining about the enormous challenges he faced every day. John showed great strength of character.

To meet his needs, John’s environment had to be adjusted, and in 2017 John received NDIS funding for allied health support and daily carers to assist him. This meant that with intense oversight from Stephanie, he was able to live on his own. John’s carers ensured his everyday wellbeing, and along with his allied health team and the artists that worked with John, the care and dedication they gave him was crucial in him being able to live the best life possible. His support workers Netty, Ellah and Ysk praised John as friendly, tenacious and resilient.

John cared about what was going on in the world ... He cared about what was going on in Australia (his concern for First Nation people) and he cared about those around him ...He was a pleasure to support ... easy-going, uncomplaining and thoughtful. (Netty, 2025)

John loved being alive and what was of most importance to him was the meaningful connections he had with others.

John was beyond delighted when his son Viv got a university Research Fellow position in Melbourne, allowing them to spend time on favoured pastimes, watching soccer and doing maths. Close friends continued to connect, including Erkki and Genevieve, Hermione, Ysk, and Martin Mackerras. He enjoyed swapping funny texts with Pearly and Tommy Adeney and he loved his visits with Marjorie Michael, including some beach breaks and summer breaks in Queensland with old friends Courtney Stevens and Leah.

At the time of his disability John was in the final stages of assembling his PhD thesis. With advocacy and input from Stephanie and Anthony Burr, Griffith University assisted in the assembly of the thesis and awarded the degree to Doctor Rodgers in 2018. On the 20th Anniversary of the QMF, it was realised that John had made the greatest contribution to Queensland music of any artist, and in partnership the QMF, QPAC and the QSO presented a gala concert of John’s works. The Genius of John Rodgers (2019) was orchestrated and conducted by Erkki Veltheim and featuring many of the musical collaborators mentioned in this obituary. John enjoyed every aspect of this event. He also loved attending performances of the remount of The Sunshine Club in 2022 and 2023.

Painting

In recent years John turned his creative energy to visual art. Ellah, artist and musician, was a carer for John for seven years and she started painting with John as a diversion. John loved painting and had two successful exhibitions, “Troubles a Mountain” in November 2023 and “my place” in November 2024, which documented John’s home at Holmes Street public housing high-rise, which is set to be demolished and privatised.

Regarding John’s art practice Ellah said recently,

I loved watching him paint. His approach was mesmerising, opposite from how I’ve seen others. The slowness, and how he made it his own. He painted with his left hand because his right hand was unstable. He mentioned it was hard to control his hand and that it was challenging. His arm moved a lot and the movement in his strokes gave life to the paint. His limitations created beautiful expressions and deliberate lines in his work. It was really hard work for him - he said it was hard and exhausting, but he loved painting.

In 2020 Ellah asked John, “What have you achieved (moved towards) with your disability?”, John replied: “Learning to talk again. Learning to eat again. Learning to walk again. Started painting, writing poetry, and eating yoghurt, and watching YouTube”.

John’s death

John died in hospital as a result of aspiration pneumonia on the 21 December 2024. His friends and family were with him in the final days and he was aware and affectionate until the final 24 hours.

In the final days, Viv, Stephanie and his close friends were at hand. Travelling from Queensland, Pearly sang songs from the Brothel repertoire and gospel with Leah. Together with Genevieve and Erkki, they all listened a number of times to Eternity. This beautiful song was written for “Ratbags” (Queensland Opera, 2004). The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Manfred Jurgenson, brought to the project by writer Doug Leonard. John had employed a compositional method that balanced abstraction and soulfulness, a beautiful expression of his great talent.

Stephanie had been close to him through all the years of his disability. She said,

John was an extraordinary person who had an extraordinary life. Maybe a part of John’s legacy is what he can teach us about living a good life. When there is catastrophic loss what really matters? For John it was, finding joy in simple things like good food and meaningful connections with the people he loved – these are the things that made him love his life.

As John said in 2019 in his speech at The Genius of John Rodgers, “My life of making music has been a journey that is essentially about the people you meet along the way and the stories you tell”.

John will be remembered by those who cared for him, not just for his remarkable mind, but for his enduring spirit, humility, and his deep humanity, his kindness, intelligence, and quiet strength.

John is survived by his son Viv, his sister Anne and her children, Stephanie and his good friends.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who contributed their recollections and documents in conversation, email, social media, and the published texts I drew on.

In alphabetical order: Anne Achay, Anthony Burr, Ellah (John’s support worker), Erkki Veltheim, Genevieve Lacey, Gian Ferrett, John Napier, Kate Miller-Heidke, Katie Noonan, Ken Edie, Linda Neil, Louise Denson, Martin Mackerras, Megan Sarmardin, Murray Kane, Paul Grabowsky, Pearly Black, Robert Davidson, Robert Perrier, Sam Pankhurst, Seamus Mee, Sharon Moore, Stephanie Blake, Tim Florence

REFERENCES

Conway, S. (2022, 18 July). Theatre Review: The Sunshine Club. Arts Hub. https://www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/theatre-review-the-sunshine-club-2564861/

Davidson, R. (200 April-May). Sacred geometry: John Rodgers. Real Time, p.43.

Gallush, K. (Ed.). (2000). In Repertoire. Real Time for the Australia Council https://www.realtime.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IN-REP-music-theatre-2000.pdf

Neil, L. (2010, October 16). John Rodgers in conversation with Linda Neil. Extempore Australia. https://extempore.com.au/the-journal/issue-5-nov-2010/john-rodgers-in-conversation-with-linda-neil/

Pinne, P. (2015, October 22) Queensland Sings: Original Musical Theatre in Queensland 1955-2015. Theatre Heritage Australia Inc. https://theatreheritage.org.au/on-stage-magazine/musicals/item/220-queensland-sings

Shand, J. (2010, 15 October). The Antripodean Collective By John Shand  Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 28 February 2025 https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/the-antripodean-collective-20101014-16lt8.html?deviceType=text 

Slater, G. (2023, 20 July) Notes from the Director’s seat – with Wesley Enoch, The Tawny Frogmouth. https://thetawnyfrogmouth.com.au/notes-from-the-directors-seat-with-wesley-enoch/

TULP: The Body Public. (2004, 17 January) The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/tulp-the-body-public-20040117-gdi691.html

Creative Works (incomplete)

COMPOSITIONS

•       1993-1997 – recorded on A Rose is A Rose

⁃       1/1/94 for solo violin

⁃       Funeral Music for John Reichardt (for violin and piano)

⁃       Speed for violin and drums

⁃       Quartet (for Violin, Bass Clarinet, Piano and Drums)

⁃       Vesica Piscis (for Bass Clarinet and Drums)

⁃        Duo for Violin and Bass Clarinet (contains Solo for Violin and Solofor Bass Clarinet)

•       Finale for Passion (1997) Australian Art Orchestra

•       Carolling (1998) Perihelion

•       Viv's Bum Dance (1998) for Topology

•       Moras (2000) Australian Art Orchestra and the Sruthi Laya ensemble

•       Places in Hell (2000) ELISION Ensemble

•       Inferno (2000) ELISION Ensemble and Adelaide Festival and Brisbane Festival

•       Amor (2000) ELISION Ensemble

•       The Garden of Deep Despair (2001) Australian Chamber Orchestra and Gondwana Voices

•       Violinist Extraordinaire John Rodgers (2001)

•       The Mizler Society (2002) with Anthony Burr, Australian Arts Orchestra

•       The Ultimate Prize: a John Rodgers Retrospective (2004) Pearly Black and Leah Cotterell, Brisbane Cabaret Festival

•       TULP: The Body Public with Justine Cooper for ELISION Ensemble at the Sydney and Brisbane Festivals

•       Birds for Genevieve (2008) artist Genevieve Lacey co-composer, works for recorder

•       Glass (2010) for Scott Tinkler with London Sinfonietta, Adelaide International Festival

•       Hear Me and Remember (2012) for Genevieve Lacey and the Four Winds Festival

•       Failure of Communication (2015) for Katie Noonan and The Brodsky Quartet

THEATRE MUSIC

•       A Cheery Soul (1992, 1996, 2000-01) Royal Queensland Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company /Neil Armfield, and Sydney Theatre Company

•       Hamlet (1994) Belvoir Street

•       Radiance (1997) Queensland Theatre Company

•       Marriage of Figaro (1998) Queensland Theatre Company

•       The Sunshine Club (1999) with Wesley Enoch for the Queensland Theatre CompanyRemounted in 2022, QT and QPAC, National tour 2022-2024

•       Fountains Beyond (2000) Queensland Theatre Company

•       Bobcat Dancing (2003) Queensland Biennial Festival of Music

•       Ratbags (2004) The Arterial Group and Opera Queensland

•       Bobcat Magic! (2005) Queensland Music Festival

•       It Just Stopped (2006) Belvoir Street Upstairs

•       Exit the King (2007) Belvoir Theatre

•       The Pink Twins (2009) QPAC and Brisbane Music Festival

•       Exit the King (2009) Company B and Malthouse Theatre

•       Where the Heart Is (2010) Expressions Dance Company

•       Zen Zen Zo Cabaret (2011) QPAC/Power Arts

•       Little Birung (2012) with Megan Sarmardin, Leah Cotterell and Jute Theatre

•       Elizabeth, almost by chance a woman (2012) Queensland Theatre Company

•       Mother Courage and Her Children (2013) Queensland Theatre Company

•       The Shadow King (2013) Melbourne Festival

•       Hipbone Sticking Out (2013) BIGhART

•       King Lear (2014) for the Sydney Theatre Company

RECORDINGS

•       Family of Abjects (1994) Madam Bones Brothel

•       A Rose is a Rose (1997) on Extreme Music

•       Fleas on the Bitch (1999) Madam Bones Brothel

•       The Uncaring Wind (2011) Independent

•       Little Birung (2011) Independent

•       Where the Heart Is (2012) Expressions Dance Theatre

EXHIBITIONS

•       Troubles a Mountain (2023) barflippys

•       my place (02 Nov 2024—01 Dec 2024) at TCB, Northcote