As something ‘that people do’, music shapes and takes shape in relation to the social settings where it is produced, distributed and consumed. Within those settings, music may provide exemplars and resources for the constitution of extra-musical matters. Through the confluence of performance and reception, musicking makes and partakes of values, ideas and tacit or practical notions about the social whole, agency and social relations; in this respect, music is an active ingredient of social life.

The concerto – the form par excellence of contrast – provides a useful case in point for socio-musical exploration. Following its vicissitudes will reveal music's role as a medium of social values and as a medium enabled and constrained by practical, conventional, material and organizational factors. This chapter explores the concerto and its link to society from two interrelated perspectives, the focus on local and pragmatic features of musicking and music's role as a meaningful medium and a medium of social change. I use three case studies to explore the concerto's social features, in especial relation to the keyboard concerto – Bach's Brandenburg No. 5, Mozart's career as a concerto composer/performer in 1780s Vienna, and Beethoven's innovations in keyboard performance and their connections to the gendering of the repertory during the early nineteenth century.