This week, I’ll spare you my further thoughts on freedom in performance, and instead point you to an excellent piece on billtron.org which touches on the issue as it existed in Bluegrass music.  It was inspired by the author’s stumbling upon a quote by Bill Monroe, grandfather of bluegrass music, who said of a fellow musician,  “How can Roscoe go out on stage without any idea of what he is going to do?”

Roscoe Holcomb, a self-taught musician, plays a unique variation of claw hammer banjo. Here we can begin to understand how the music of Bill Monroe and Roscoe Holcomb differ. While Monroe and all of his band members perform in a thoroughly-rehearsed and predetermined manner, with only the slightest room for spontaneous musical decisions and individual embellishments of their instrumental lines, Holcomb’s performance technique creates an expectation for and ease of spontaneous improvisation throughout the music, both at the structural and ornamental level.

-from  billtron.org