[1]: 635 Born in England, Jon Rose attended King's School, Rochester, where he sang in the cathedral choir and studied the violin[2] on scholarship.

[4] Rose studied and performed in a range of genres in Australia and the United Kingdom during the 1970s, including Italian club bands, country & western, bebop, and new music.

He has performed as a soloist or as a member of a small group of fellow improvisers, including Jim Denley, Louis Burdett, Dave Ellis, Simone De Haan, Veryan Weston and Rik Rue.

[9] Performed in Österreichische Rundfunk Concert Hall, Vienna (1999) and at Wogarno Station in Western Australia (2001), the satire was the result of Rose's experiences at two violin factories in China.

Commissioned by Ensemble Offspring, it was performed by them, Speak Percussion, and actors collaborating with the Creative Audio Unit of Radio National at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

[34][35] Rose expanded Great Fences of Australia to other locations including Bosnia, Belfast, the Golan Heights, Mexico, the United States, and Finland.

[47] The longest continuous solo (12 hours) was part of Sound Barriers at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at the Alexander Mackie School of Art in Sydney in 1982, followed by a ten-hour concert at New Music America in Houston in 1986.

In 2006, John Oswald (composer) invited Rose to improvise a solo part for the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

[7] Another violin concerto, Elastic Band (2014), was Rose's collaboration with composer Elena Kats-Chernin, conductor Ilan Volkov, and The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

[65] In this way, Rose is able to simultaneously play multiple lines of melodies and polyrhythms by means of different controllers which measure the physicality of his high speed improvisation.

[66] New York Times music critic Stephen Holden observed the wide range of Rose's improvisations, from late Romantic tonal solos to freeform explorations.

[68] According to Graham Strahle, Rose has established a reputation as a musical larrikin, observing that Rose has been "pushing boundaries in improvisation and technology for years as a violinist, composer and general musical provocateur, coming up with such wry inventions as the interactive MIDI violin bow and Fence Project – they rival Percy Grainger’s wacky Kangaroo Pouch Tone Tool for unbridled creativity.

[70] In his review of the CD Futch for The Squid's Ear, Kurt Gottschalk called Rose "a tireless conceptualist, making music out of political borders and rewriting economics and history like a viol-centric Marco Polo".

[73] In 2006, Rose was awarded the David Tudor Composer-in-Residence at Mills College and completed a lecture and concert tour of various University of California system campuses that same year.