What notes you don't play is just as important as what you play..

I think that’s a significant part of interpretation—learning not to get in the way of the music, but instead to find and pass along meaning in it. As a player you get to make stylistic choices for yourself, but the quality of the playing will depend on what choices you end up making and how well they align with the music.

I feel like there's a line a musician walks.
If one's hypercritical of oneself, one may never leave the practice room.
One needs some support. Someone they can trust.
On the other hand, developing too much confidence can also run amuck.
Again, one needs somebody with an honest assessment.
After 30-40 years one may figure things are the way they are.
Find another instrument to learn and it starts over.

The good thing is that you understand it now. So your sound clips that we enjoy listening to may even get better.

Pete I'm with you. Searching for what you hear in a tune but is not being played. IMHO thats how your personal style gets developed.

Judging by what I've heard in your audio files, you don't sound very aggressive at all, more like a laid-back traditional fiddler to me...

Yes Pete it seems you have taken on that advice based on the clips you've shared! What I wish I'd taken on from earlier days is to lighten up on the bow (both grip and pressure-wise). I still have to constantly remind myself!

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Originally posted by wrench13

Pete I'm with you. Searching for what you hear in a tune but is not being played. IMHO thats how your personal style gets developed.

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Based on the OP, I think that's the polar opposite of what he's saying. The comment from his friend was about the danger of getting caught up in trying to find some kind of meaning that may not even exist instead of just playing the tune and letting it unfold naturally.

I do think that players are best when they develop a personality, but I also think it's one of the great paradoxes of life that the greatest freedom of expression comes from first learning how to conform to standards. Being different in itself is no sign of greatness.

I think Picasso is a great illustration of all of this: he is still considered one of the most expressive and unique artists ever to live. Yet he didn't begin his career painting in the style of his later work. He learned traditional techniques and painted masterfully in the classical style first. Then, having absorbed and understood the traditional forms, he developed a style of his own--not truly divorced from the classical style, but rather built in a way that went against its rules in interesting ways that worked because he so completely understood the framework and how it could be altered. Abstract art only makes sense in reference to what isn't abstract. Music only makes sense in relation to its own forms. I think it was Viktor Zuckerkandl who said that atonal or dissonant music couldn't exist or make any sense to listeners without having followed from the tonality of the music that preceded it and that also provides the framework for its understanding. 

To draw another parallel, it's rather interesting to see interviews with Picasso in which the interviewers try to drill into his works to find meaning--meaning that may or not be there in the first place. In those exchanges you can see Picasso's frustration and his adamant refusal of the idea that his work is meant to have other people's ideas of meaning superimposed.