We define commutants mod normed ideals associated with compact smooth manifolds with boundary. The results about the K -theory of these operator algebras include an exact sequence for the connected sum of manifolds, derived from the Mayer–Vietoris sequence. We also make a few remarks about bicommutants mod normed ideals and about the quasicentral modulus for the quasinormed p -Schatten–von Neumann classes 0 < p < 1.