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. 

Pete I always enjoy your playing, and I also know what you mean…

…before I even played a note, a great player told me to relax, and slouch in my chair.
I”m working on being less of the anxious perfectionistic type - in both music and life!

i think it's a bit of all the above, and i get frustrated when playing with others, especially when we haven't practiced together. i have bits and bobs that i try to get in, but they don't necessarily fit with another's playing. But if i relax and just play the tune it seems to be better.

Thanks all for your input

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Originally posted by pete_fiddle

i think it's a bit of all the above, and i get frustrated when playing with others, especially when we haven't practiced together. i have bits and bobs that i try to get in, but they don't necessarily fit with another's playing. But if i relax and just play the tune it seems to be better.

Thanks all for your input

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If you play with others, hopefully, you are all listening to each other. The first thing in doing this is to get in sync with them, not to immediately to try and get in your "bits and bobs". As you get in sync together you may then be able to get in some of those and the others may then respond. Don't try to impose yourself too early in the tune the jam is playing.

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Originally posted by magicfingers

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

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I think it was in the remake of Karate Kid, the kid's girl friend is taking classical violin lessons and her coach says "You must play the space between the notes."

Really? Play between the notes? I don't think that means anything.

Hollywood!

I sort of relate to the "What notes you don't play" thing.

If i just concentrate on a triplet and use the note before it as a "preparatory" note (or ghost note), the triplet pops.

That's just one example of the note that i don't play being important.

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Originally posted by Brian Wood

Really? Play between the notes? I don't think that means anything.

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Yeah, but you have to admit:  it sounds deep!

It is deep, it took me years to find out when not to play notes..

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Originally posted by pete_fiddle

It is deep, it took me years to find out when not to play notes..

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Yes it is;  when one learns this, it makes the whole ensemble "jell" so to speak.. Considering everybody in the group knows it. If one person in the group hasn't figured it out the jelly gets real runny real fast!!

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Originally posted by Brian Wood

Really? Play between the notes? I don't think that means anything.

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I think it means to give the notes space to breath, dont rush the notes, pauses, how ever slight allow the notes to resonate. 

The real stuff has a whole lot of notes in it that aren't actually there, but you hear them. Some of those old timers could be cooking away on a tune, but you'd have to look pretty close to see their fingers doing anything but just sitting there on the board.

This all sounds woo to me. If any of it actually makes you play better, more to you.

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Originally posted by pete_fiddle

I sort of relate to the "What notes you don't play" thing.

If i just concentrate on a triplet and use the note before it as a "preparatory" note (or ghost note), the triplet pops.

That's just one example of the note that i don't play being important.

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I suppose you could call it 'creating some suspense'. 

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Originally posted by Brian Wood

Really? Play between the notes? I don't think that means anything.

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Debussy is said to have coined the phrase "Music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them." Miles Davis and Yo-Yo Ma have said this as well. It's a concept that is regularly discussed among musicians. The point is not that notes and tone don't matter, just that you don't really have music without the interstices  

I think this makes sense when you look at mediocre fiddling--players don't have much understanding of space and tend to just keep the bow moving constantly. It's like talking endlessly in run-on sentences. Without breaks, pauses, or changes, there isn't any meaning. A bad fiddler can play the right notes with the right bowing patterns and with an "authentic" sound but still not say anything at all in playing. Phrasing is everything, and it only happens by separating things, similar to the way that definitions are made: things need to be separated from others to be given meaning.

I think a good way to illustrate the importance of space is to consider a piece of music that starts on a pickup. A mediocre musician will just start playing whatever note comes first, and it may even be difficult to identify a rhythm in the playing as a result. A good musician will be able to convey the sense of the absence of sound before the pickup. It might just be one eighth note that's played to start the tune, but the way the two players approach it completely changes the musicality of the whole tune. 

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Originally posted by The Violin Beautiful

 

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Debussy is said to have coined the phrase "Music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them." 

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A lot of people say it, for sure. If it helps conceptualize music in a way that helps you're playing then no harm.

Find the melodies within the notes. If you're able to read music, pay due (but not neurotic) attention to what is the first note of the measure and emphasize it a bit when you play it.