While the accompaniment of actual dancing was certainly a major use for sixteenthcentury dance music, it also served other functions, including those of background music and pedagogy. The simple nature of much of the music, particularly the consort music, rendered it an effective tool for teaching amateur musicians. The proliferation of tutors and other instruction manuals for both dance and music indicated the spread of education outside the plush homes of the aristocracy. Pierre Phalèse intended his first publication, Des chansons reduictz en Tablature de Lut (1545), “inciter la jeuness à quelque doulx & melodieux traictement de la jolie & excellente musique (to encourage young people with sweet and melodious treatments of pretty music of high quality).”

Like many of Phalèse's Low Countries publications, including those by master musicians such as Sebastien Vreedman, this book of lute intabulations of French partsongs includes a pedagogical introduction to the instruments. Henri Vanhulst has argued that the commonly held view of Phalèse's works as lesser versions of the pedagogical works of master lutenist Adrian Le Roy, should be revisited. While Le Roy does indeed define the Parisian school of playing, Vanhulst makes it clear that Phalèse based his work on Parisian publications and models, but varied from them as well.

Pierre Attaingnant's Parisian publications of consort music include no performance instructions. Similarly, Phalèse's Chorearum molliorum collectanea/Recueil de Danseries (1583), proffers no introductory instructions, but its title includes information about possible performance, claiming that the book comprises “nearly every type of dance…just as comfortable for voices as for all the musical instruments, newly collected from known master musicians and amateurs…” The relatively simple homophonic settings in both Attaingnant's and Phalèse's book share the century with extremely virtuosic settings of the same tunes for solo instruments and partsongs with complex polyphony. Interestingly, the more complex instrumental pieces tend to be used in the same dance genres, like pavanes, gaillardes, and canaries, for which complex choreographies survive.