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In instrumental composition, the performer has always been the physical agent of a work. The composer's task is to harness that physicality towards the expression of his own ideas. The performer's task is to express himself through the explication of the ideas he is given. The latitude of interpretation within a score between the actual sound and the description of the sound is one of the poetic devices available to both parties*.
Graphic scores and other visual or textual devices largely mediate a composer's communication with a performer. Traditional manuscript, learned by both as a common language, is comparable to textual instruction, and modern graphical scores, are often visual abstractions unique to each work. Aural imagination bridges the gap. Performer and composer communication has been necessarily multi-modal; aural, visual and textual. It also includes an evolving set of practices which has its roots in European "common practice." These are studied in great detail by both composers and performers. In fact, the graphical symbols for much of a manuscript can be thought of as textual in that each note in the score can be said to represent a specific note, to the same exent a letter signals a specific phoneme.
*In this sense it is often considered that the traditional score allows a kind of plasticity that fixed scores do not. However, this research is concerned with the kind of plasticity referred to in the other plastic arts.