Making It Up Together : The University of Chicago Press : 9780226667607 : 022666760X : 17 Apr 2020 : Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes. Through two contrasting Balinese case studies?of the reyong gong chime's melodic norot practice and the interlocking drumming tradition kendang arja?Tilley proposes and tests analytical frameworks for examining collectively improvised performance. At the micro-level, Tilley's analyses of