Jack Flash Jr wrote
Zigackly, ferpectly right. And if all those pianists have a little magic attached to them, well, how lucky we are! But I also think it's a lot more difficult to inject emotion into a genre that requires strict adherence to the score as a minimum requirement. No one get's their feather's in a froth if a Hendrix number is not played note for note as long as the invention matches the spirit of the original. The problem may not lie with the artists themselves but with the constraints of their art.
I'm quite wary of judging one musical world by the norms of another.
The last couple of years Richard Thompson has been working with orchestral players. This came about because of a side project that he undertook which required a string section. He wanted to do the arrangements himself and sought some advice from various conductors, learned the ranges of the various instruments and so on. He had to score everything. He said that he was surprised at how well the orchestral guys could sight read, and they were amazed at the notion that he and the other rockers (I use that term very loosely) he brought into the show could learn and perform an hour or so's music WITHOUT a score and then improvise solos over the top.
There's still 12 semi-tones in an octave and the time signatures tend to work in the same way, but other than that they're very different musical worlds that place very different demands on the participants.
I think some of the super technical guitar whiz "rock" music might actually be nearer to the classical MO actually. It requires great precision, and the complexity of the pieces might not leave a lot of space for extemporisation - and maybe that's quite fine in that musical world.
To pick up on something else that's been touched on this thread, I think that once you don't demand exact conformity with a score then the performer or the arranger starts to become a composer/creator as well. Hendrix played a lot of songs by other people, but with his own arrangements and with the solos certainly being an outpouring of his own creativity.
This sort of non-compositional creativity certainly manifests itself in the orchestral world. Different conductors will want certain passages attacked in a different way or have different ideas about dynamics. They're a major creative force in orchestral music IMO. When I used to go to the JPO a lot I was often surprised by how diffferent the orchestra could sound under different conductors.
