Gavin Bryars is often viewed as the archetypal postmodern musician, constantly scavenging and assembling disparate sounds into eclectic and anachronistic composites that convey the diversity of increasingly connected musical worlds. His 1986 chamber work Sub Rosa is no exception. Blending sounds derived from avant-garde jazz and a minimalistic pace with a timbral palette that hints at the early sixteenth century as often as the late twentieth, the work demonstrates Bryars' penchant for stylistic and generic synthesis.

Bryars composed the work after hearing a 1984 album entitled In Line by progressive jazz guitarist Bill Frisell (who would later perform on Bryars' After the Requiem in 1990). Bryars was particularly enchanted by one track, "Throughout" (particularly, the composer says, because while traveling it helped ease his fear of flying during takeoff), the guitar solos from which he eventually transcribed. In preparing a piece for a concert in the 1986 Flanders Festival in Belgium, Bryars turned to these transcriptions and began reworking them for a mixed chamber ensemble comprised of piano, violin, string bass, clarinet, vibraphone, and recorder (of the woodwind variety, not the electronic kind—though the latter is employed in a number of Bryars' other works). This ensemble is unique in that every instrument has a tone quite distinctive from each other, and each combination of instruments presents a new kind of timbral color. Bryars manipulates these colors very deliberately, using long sustained tones and often pungent harmonies to render Frisell's borrowed melodic fragments from continually changing perspectives. This contrast of tone color finds expressive synergy in the contrasts of time that Bryars creates through simple juxtapositions of the old and new. The familiar sound of the clarinet, for example, is frequently paired with that of the recorder, an instrument that conveys to modern listeners an inexorable sense of archaism. Likewise, the smooth tones of the violin are often paired with the crystalline sound of the vibraphone, which the performer bows (along the edge of the bar) instead of striking. In the original performance of the work, this illusion of broad stylistic time spans was coupled with a clever manipulation of space to create a feeling of physical distance. The original performance venue, an art gallery, included a large round room with a long, rich echo; Bryars placed the recorder within that room, adjacent to the stage but apart from the other performers, suggesting a search for resonances between sounds separated by both distance and time.

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