At 8:19 AM -0500 11/10/02, David H. Bailey wrote:
But then if Mingus sang the person's part to him/her with the intention of them NOT playing it exactly as sung, how far away from what was originally sung were they allowed to get?
In Mingus' case, you knew because Mingus would yell at you, possibly threatening physical violence. I gather that they figured out how much freedom they had rather quickly. In some cases, a lot of freedom. In others, none. It depended on the situation (and Mingus' mood that day!)
And as soon as that person played something different, even slightly, from what Mingus wrote, who really was the composer?
And if you depart from one of Mozart's cadenzas, or put in your own ornaments in a Baroque piece, or use Musica Ficta in an early piece, or change the dynamics in Debussy, or change some orchestration in Schubert (as is common, I understand) or play Bach on a modern instrument or with modern phrasing, then are you now co-composer?
The composer is the one who devised the framework (the blueprint, as Darcy said) or the recipe, and the performers bake the cake, doing whatever they need to do to make the realisation a success. What is needed differs from piece to piece, group to group, player to player, and among listeners. This is especially true in music with an improvisatory element, like Balinese gamelan music, Indian ragas, jazz, and anything with a figured bass or a simple V-I cadence where the cadenza should be. But it is still true in strictly notated music, too.
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