So here’s a tricky question I haven’t got an answer to: for my line of ambition, should I blend in or stand out? I have a moderate reputation around Oxford for pushing the boundaries, particularly with doing blues and spirituals on violin or viola and voice alone (and also for, at unplugged performances, wandering through the audience and other somewhat stagey tricks … ), and playing solos which are lengthy and dynamic, not to say aggressive, beyond the usual range of gigging violinists. (Romantic concerto cadenzas are of course a different matter!)

And that’s potentially an asset – at least I’m memorable and usually well-received by average-joe crowds. But most people hiring a string player to dep, or record, or back a name act, don’t want them to stick out. They want someone who does the job and sounds as much as possible like the person who wrote the part expected (not strictly true in the complexities of pre-nineteenth century authentic or otherwise or somewhere in between performance, but generally a broadly valid concept). They don’t want an obtrusive musical or social personality, that just stands to reason.

So should my self-promotion, and what I do in the public sphere, actually aim to be very genre-faithful – to show that I can play ‘classical’ pieces in the accepted manner of the mainstream, insofar as there still is one for that genre, that I can do British folk dances like a native-born Shetlander (I only wish!), etc. etc.? It would certainly make me a safe pair of hands, but would it also make me immensely forgettable?

Perhaps the real problem is that even as a freelancer, there’s an element of trying to do two things at once. You want to be open to being hired both as a hired hand for someone else’s gig, but also as an act or a part of an act in your own right. And most of the time those things pull in opposite directions. It’s trying to prove you’re not just a jack of all trades but a master of all of them as well.