Does form create freedom?

Reading Fish's "theology" regarding the freedom gained from understanding the form of sentences (You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free), I wonder if the same "freedom" can be gained through a thorough knowledge of musical forms. As an undergraduate, I took a composition class in which each week the professor assigned us a different composer's style to imitate in a composition of our own. He felt that learning the compositional processes of various composers would lead to an expansion of what he referred to as our "compositional tool-box"-- as if we were all budding composers in the vein of Charles Ives, changing our musical styles as often as we change our clothes.

Certainly, knowledge is power. Musical education gave us more options in regards to the choices we made for our own composition. After all, how likely is it that I would have chosen to use a quartal chord if we had never studied the music of Copland? In doing so, quartal chords became part of my "toolbox," one of the many options I had to chose from.

In this sense, I agree with Fish that forms shall set you free. Knowing what sentence structure means or what sonata form encompasses means that I can chose to make changes to that form-- to extend my development section, adding length and maybe even an entirely new theme. However, although my understanding of this form led to my challenge of it, my freedom was ultimately reached after I knew how to break the rules of this form. Knowing the form leads to this freedom, not following it. Can a composer really achieve "freedom" if they are concerned with antecedent and consequent phrases, with returning to the original theme in the tonic, of voicing their cadences in the appropriate manner, and so on? Does Mozart's music strike you as creatively free because of the clarity with which his melodies can be divided into neat and tidy phrases?

For me, the answer is no. When it comes to musical freedom, I think of aleatoric music, and of composers like John Cage-- works like 4'33", Aria, TV Koln. Would the freedom of form achieved in these works have been reached if he had not been aware of the form to begin with? Or, more significantly, would his music be so significant to us if we ourselves were not aware of the freedom he had achieved in it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuk5JChIJ18