Western art music’s institutional separation of composition and performance roles obscures the reality that most musical traditions and contemporary practices involve complex interactions between these activities. This project challenges the composer/performer binary by examining practices where the boundaries blur, collapse or never existed in the first place. We explore how different configurations of creative agency, temporal decision-making and collaborative authorship produce different kinds of musical knowledge and aesthetic outcomes. Key questions include:

• Understanding improvisation as compositional thinking in real time. How do improvisers make structural, harmonic and formal decisions with different temporal horizons? What kinds of knowledge, preparation and aesthetic judgement enable spontaneous creativity?
• Examining collaborative devising processes. How do ensembles, bands and production teams negotiate shared creative authorship? What roles do hierarchy, democratic process and emergent leadership play in collective creativity? How do different collaborative structures affect aesthetic outcomes?
• Mapping the spectrum between spontaneous and considered decision-making. Rather than treating improvisation and composition as binary opposites, how can we understand them as different points on continua of preparation, revision, fixity and repeatability?

Analysing performance as creative interpretation. How do performers make compositional decisions in realising scores, arrangements or existing recordings? What is the relationship between faithfulness and creativity in performance practice?