Jeff -
Delighted you started this thread. I have often thought there are parallels between music history and the history of golf architecture. In both cases the issue of authorial 'intention' is a gnarly one. I think about the issue a bit differently than you do.
Both art forms are fundamentally performative. Mozart had a clear idea about how he wanted, say, a piano concerto to sound to an audience in Vienna circa 1785. His written musical text tells us a lot about that. The instruments in use in the era would be a factor. Playing practices of the period would be another. (Trying to recapture the way Mozart's music was played in his lifetime is, I take it, at the heart of the original instruments movement.) The idea being that playing Mozart with older instruments and staying as close as possible to his score brings us, presumably, closer to Mozart's musical intentions than Thomas Beecham in 1960 conducting the London Symphony and a soloist playing a modern grand piano.
Golf architecture is also fundamentally performative. Golf architects design golf courses for people to play golf on them. And like Mozart, architects have certain ideas about how the game should be played on their courses. We have schools of gca that parse (in a rough way) such preferences among architects. Where bunkers are placed, ground contours utilized, the location of hazards and so forth are not random. An architect arranges those features in ways he thinks (sometimes knowingly, sometimes not) will encourage (or maybe discourage) certain ways of playing the game. At the heart of the course restoration movement and to some extent the popularity of using hickory clubs - not unlike the original instrument movement in music - is to return to a way of playing the game that matches up better with the intentions of the original architect. Again, like the original instrument movement, the rationale is that returning a course to its original design and playing it with older implements makes it a more interesting, challenging, hence better game to play. (That's why you go to the expense and trouble of restoring a course, no? And also why Trevor Pinnock, Nickolaus Harnoncourt and others devoted their musical careers to playing music that tries to recapture the way it sounded at the time it was composed, no? They thought it made for a better, more interesting musical performance.)
So it is the performative aspect of both disciplines that, I think, overlap in interesting ways. Getting back to original scores or architectural drawings is a part of recovering the performative aspect of both disciplines, but doing so is only an aspect of a larger project.
Again, delighted you joined in. I hope you will hang around.
Bob