How can violinists create a personal sound?

Over the years I’ve interviewed more violinists than I’d care to count. What do they have in common? Maybe it’s paradoxical, but the one issue that comes up time and again is the question of individuality in sound. It can be a preoccupation, even an obsession: exactly what gives a violinist a singular, identifiable tone remains one of the great mysteries of the musical world.

This isn’t confined to violinists: it applies to any instrumentalist, including pianists. And conductors, for that matter. But when I first worked for The Strad at the end of the 1980s, it was the violinists who went on about it: ‘Of course, my idol is Heifetz, but nobody today has any individuality.’

I started wondering if that might be no coincidence. After all, if so many violinists were saying the same thing, worshipping Heifetz and navel-gazing over why they didn’t sound as ‘individual’ as he did, was that perhaps why they had all begun to sound the same?