Performing music: Oral and improvising traditions

This chapter illustrates the diversity of performance contexts that exist across musical traditions, whose varying priorities and constraints demand different sorts of cognitive work to do with the conceptualization and acquisition of technical skill; memorization (and of what sort); the prioritization of different aspects of musicianship; and the conventions of performance context that may implicate varying levels of skill from audiences, too, as part of a successful performance. The places in which oral and improvised musical traditions exist have an impact on the psychological demands of the act of performance, for both musicians and audience.