Creative practice in music takes place in a distributed and interactive manner embracing the activities of composers, performers and improvisers—despite the sharp division of labour between these roles that traditional concert culture often presents. Two distinctive features of contemporary music are the greater incorporation of improvisation and the development of integrated and collaborative working practices between composers and performers. By blurring the distinction between composition and performance, improvisation and collaboration provide important perspectives on the distributed creative processes that play a central role in much contemporary concert music. This volume explores how collaboration and improvisation enable and constrain these creative processes. Organized into three parts, thirteen chapters and twelve shorter Interventions present diverse perspectives on distributed and collaborative creativity in music, on a range of collaborations between composers and performers, and on the place of improvisation within contemporary music, broadly defined. The thirteen chapters provide more substantial discussions of a variety of conceptual frameworks and particular projects, while the twelve Interventions provide more informal contributions from a variety of practitioners (composers, performers, improvisers), giving direct insights into the pleasures and problems of working creatively in music in collaborative and improvised ways.