The American Songbook has been a fruitful source of improvisation for jazz musicians, either through artists interpreting those songs themselves, or crafting new songs from their chord changes as bebop musicians did prolifically in the 1940s. This chapter investigates this influence, beginning with the debt that jazz improvisers owe to Tin Pan Alley composers, before turning that relationship around to consider how the success of those same songwriters depended on an ongoing attempt to identify what made jazz appealing to American listeners and distil aspects of that enigmatic essence into the commercially viable object of popular song. In examples like Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather,” Irving Berlin’s “Putting on the Ritz,” or any number of Cole Porter compositions, we see the workmanlike creators of Tin Pan Alley incorporating not just musical elements associated with jazz, but also a more general “sensibility,” intended to recreate the music’s blues-informed world-weariness or performative impertinence.

Moving forward to the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Chapter 14 provides a survey of contemporary female and gender-non-conforming artists using electronics for music. Margaret Schedel and Flannery Cunningham highlight how greater access to affordable means to manipulate digital sound from the autonomy of personal computers – away from difficult-to-access studios staffed by technicians and equipped with complex technology, which were previously largely the domain of male ‘experts’ – has opened up electronic music to a wider demographic of people (in terms of gender, race, and class). Taking an ethnographic approach which draws upon questionnaire material from twenty-four respondents variously identifying as composers, sound artists, instruments builders, and programmers, this chapter explores some of this diversity through the artists’ own words.

Having considered polyphony as practice in the previous chapter, the focus switches to its practitioners. To begin, the view of music as theory and practice in the Renaissance period is reviewed, tracing the transition from the medieval view of music as science to its status as an art, which comes to a head in the Renaissance period and affects the perception and social status of practitioners of polyphony. This leads to a detailed consideration of the singer-cleric, the primary model for practitioners of polyphony at the start of the period, and the gradual recognition of composition as a salaried activity in its own right, independent of singing, in the decades just before 1500. The sixteenth century brings greater diversification, not least owing to the rise of an urban middle class, catered to by the explosion onto the scene of print culture. The implications of these trends for musicians is considered in the remainder of the chapter, which examines the changing status of the composer, the role of instrumental ensembles in the performance of polyphony, and the emergent status of women as both paid performers and published composers.

This chapter examines some of the material aspects of the daily practise of music at court. It investigates the motivations of musical practise at court that took place on a more intimate scale on a daily basis. Schütz notably shows that musical performance at court served purposes of different nature, ranging from entertainment to instruction, from diplomatic tool to image-fashioning, from invitation to the dance to personal recreation. It involved members of the court at every level both as performers and listeners, and was one of the only means by which social barriers could occasionally be blurred. That music was provided by both servants and courtiers is reflected in Shakespeare’s All is True when Queen Katherine requests one of her ladies in waiting to leave her work and perform a song for her in act 3, scene 1. Eventually, Schütz insists on the importance of transmission. Indeed, in order to obtain the skills necessary to discuss music, rulers and courtiers had of course to be instructed in the art. Next to these intimate forms of court performance, then, there existed a pedagogical type of performance: tutors instructing their royal students, both children and adults.