Part of a recent letter to Simon Fischer about the tone exercises
I once again express my eternal gratitude to you for the tone production work you recommended. It's like I have been playing in black and white my whole life, and there are now suddenly colours everywhere to be discovered.
The explosion of possibilities I'm experiencing is almost overwhelming - a similar feeling to when I got my new violin (which is a very fine old Italian), and perhaps even more so. It will take months and maybe even years for me to master all the new-found colours of the instrument, and I am looking forward to every minute of it.
It is with some regret now that I seem to have played the violin for more than twenty years with almost no awareness of contact point and the different tonal qualities of each one, and I think in the process of all of that, I had stopped listening!