Every piece of every performing art is created many times, first by the writer/composer and, again, each time the work is performed. Ansel Adams was a great pianist before he became a great photographer. When he wrote about photography, he often made analogies with music. In his will, he bequeathed many of his photos and negatives to the University of New Mexico with the stipulation that graduate students in photography use his negatives to make their own prints. He said that making a negative is like writing a score, and making a print is like performing the music. Knowing how the negative looks like will tell you a lot about how the print will look, but Ansel Adams believed in artistic creation in print-making. How much more so in music!

...you can never really plumb the entire truth of ideas in music.   That in essence is the power of music -- the fact that the art form is larger, deeper, and far more varied than any single person can divine in one lifetime -- and realizing it should give pause to any artist who starts to consider himself all-knowing. We are all simply steps in a continuing age-old tradition. When we do something that enhances that tradition, that makes it richer, purer, clearer -- then we have done what we were put here for. These are the words of Isaac Stern, one of the leading classical violinists of the twentieth century. If this is true of classical music, with its annotated, written scores, it must be so much more true of music in the folk tradition.