I Like Playing Drums
I really like playing the drum kit. In important ways, drumming and being a drummer define who I am. For about as long as I have been a drummer, and all the more since I have taken this habit with me into adult life, through numerous moves from one apartment or house to another, between cities, and recently between countries, I have wondered why I keep doing it. Let me be clear: I have never considered not being a drummer, but it has occurred to me from time to time that I have not really articulated the reasons why I find drumming, in the various forms in which I do it, so very compelling. As I have noted before, ‘I have found fulfillment through every aspect of being a drummer’.1 Not playing drums or not having the opportunity to play drums is unimaginable to me. While such a claim might seem outrageous to some, me this is very real indeed. As drummer-scholar, Bill Bruford acknowledges, drumming ‘is what I do, and what I do is who I am’.2 There are numerous possible reasons why I find drumming so necessary, and in this chapter I focus on two possible rationales – autotelicity and eudaimonia (both explained below). I have written before about drumming in relation to these ideas,3 and in this essay I look at possible connections and contradictions between the two concepts.
While being a drummer necessarily involves numerous activities (such as maintaining the instrument, learning songs, and driving to shows and rehearsals) I limit my writing here to experiences of (or that mostly comprise) playing the drums. I should emphasize here that my focus is not on performing, but on playing. I do not play drums exclusively in, or in preparation for, performance. When I perform, however, I do so largely because doing so means that I get to play drums. I have previously suggested that drumming for me is an autotelic (inherently worthwhile) activity. I wrote the following about rock drumming in particular, and the sentiment is also true of the other drumming that I do:
[Rock] drumming for me is a particularly autotelic experience. I do it because I need to feel that autotelic experience as part of a meaningful life being me. I do it because it is intrinsically valuable in and of itself.4
In what follows, I interrogate this notion that drumming is ‘intrinsically valuable in and of itself’, because playing drums is core to what Laing terms my ‘ontological security’.5 Playing drums provides me with ‘a feeling and a condition … [which] signals that the present activity … is in harmony with the daimon that is [my] true self’.6 I do not value drumming ‘for itself’, but rather because of what doing it does for me. With research into drums, drummers, and drumming being a relatively new field, there is no literature, to my knowledge, that connects philosophy and drumming (by which I mean, in this context, playing the drum kit). There is helpful, resonant writing on the philosophy of play,7 including Rathunde and Isabella’s conception of ‘leisure play’ as ‘an intrinsically motivated and deeply enjoyable activity’.8 It is this notion of the intrinsic about which I am less than convinced. Schmid, writing about sports, and whose findings and assertions that I find analogous here to drumming, notes that ‘the philosophical literature defines autotelic play as an activity pursued for factors intrinsic to the activity’.9 Schmid, however, ‘find[s] this conception of autotelic play and its justification unsatisfactory’.10 I am inclined to concur, since I do not play the drums just to play the drums – that would not make any sense. I play the drums because of the rewards I reap from doing so. Per what Schmid terms a ‘hedonistic’ account, ‘it is not the activity itself that is intrinsically valuable but [my] enjoyment or pleasure derived from the activity’.11 Richard Shusterman also captures some aspects of this derived pleasure, in his writing about aesthetic experience, which is:
Essentially valuable and enjoyable;
Something vividly felt and subjectively savoured, affectively absorbing us and focusing our attention on its immediate presence;
Meaningful experience, not mere sensation.12
As I explore below, the meaningful experience of playing drums is more than mere pleasure; drumming is often as challenging as it is thrilling. In this vein, Ryan, Huta, and Deci construe eudaimonia as comprising more than mere pleasure and residing in ‘living a complete life, or the realization of valued human potentials’, such as (for me) drumming.13 I prefer, then, to consider that I find eudaimonia in drumming.14
Bauman describes individuals who live this way as possessing an autotelic personality,15 seeking optimal, flow experiences that exist at the crossroads of challenge and reward.16 Csikszentmihalyi writes that people with an autotelic personality do things for the sake of doing them, rather than in order to attain later, external goals.17 Wrigley and Emerson tell us that during such intense flow experiences, ‘the experience becomes autotelic, that is, [those taking part] experience a high level of intrinsic enjoyment as a result’.18 I am unsure that the kinds of experience these commentators describe are truly as autotelic as they claim. I offer instead this claim: that the rewards I feel and seek derive from drumming, but are not, or at least not mostly, intrinsic to drumming.
As I have noted elsewhere, extant scholarship on drumming tends, with very few exceptions, to ignore experiential accounts, but for me as a drummer, the value, interest and meaning in drumming lie primarily in the experience of playing the drums [3]. In the tradition of autoethnographic research, I therefore present this deeply personal account of the meaningfulness and value of drumming, realizing that my experiences and expressions are not generalizable to the broader population of drummers.19 However, as Tomlin notes, ‘reality, in fact, is indeterminable and empty of inherent existence … the notion of … independent categories for the things we experience and perceive in the world, unwisely ignores or blocks out the fact that objects, perceptions and thoughts are non-essential, irreducible, interdependent and impermanent’.20 Experiences of drumming, then, while undoubtedly related, are as varied as the drummers who experience them. It is an honour to share with readers some of mine.
I am writing this essay almost two years since moving to the United States, having spent the first forty years of my life living in the United Kingdom. I recently became a legal permanent resident in the United States, which means I am on the fourth visa I have used to travel and live in this country in two years. This feels like an especially salient time to be thinking about drumming and eudaimonia, since until I recently acquired permanent resident status, I have been unable to play drums professionally, and therefore unable to seek to do so – an altogether disorientating experience, having spent the prior twenty years earning a good portion of my income from playing drums, and always with the option to do so. With all the social, emotional logistical, financial, and professional turmoil of the past two years, playing drums has occupied an unprecedented type of niche in my life; I have craved every chance to play, yet felt a huge part of me being suppressed by the infrequency of playing opportunities. I was recently able to make the down-payment on a home, and in the garage there I have set up a small drum kit – the first time in my professional or adult life that I have had an acoustic drum kit I can play in my home.
In this essay I present personal accounts of drumming in a rock band and practising alone at the drum kit. I have chosen to write about these particular contexts that capture the places, purposes and modes of drumming in my life now, because my interactions with drummers and other musicians suggest that similar experiences can be at the core of what it means to know oneself as a musician. While the experiences I describe are unique to me and are therefore not generalizable, I hope that my observations about playing the drums may resonate (no pun intended!) with some readers. I discuss drumming as amateuring, which Regelski notes is ‘time well spent, even when it requires strenuous effort’21 (emphasis in original). Amateur musicians are often not highly regarded; ‘amateur’ and the more derogatory ‘amateurishness’, are often presented in contrast with ‘professional’ or ‘professionalism’, and tend to denote poor quality of craftsmanship and artistry. However, Kratus reminds us that ‘amateur’ derives etymologically from ‘love’ and ‘lover’, and that ‘an amateur musician is one who engages in music purely for the love of doing so’.22 Following this definition, I feel no shame in being a profoundly amateur musician. Moreover, it is in musical amateuring at the drums that I find community, meaning and peace.
Black Belt Jesus
For most of the last two years I have been living in temporary accommodation, unsure of where my family would settle, and mostly on visas not permitting me to work outside of my day job. These factors all conspired to mean that I have not been in a tight, belting rock band that rehearses regularly and has unrealistic dreams beyond its potential (hallmarks of each of the dozens of bands I have been in from the age of fourteen), since before I moved to the United States from London. That has been a gaping hole at the core of my being. After one abortive audition for a band with a megalomaniacal singer who insisted on recording all the instruments for the band’s demo EP despite a demonstrable weakness playing most of them, I again visited the local Craigslist pages and searched for ‘Stoner Rock Band’. I found one band – Black Belt Jesus – in need of a drummer, had a quick phone call with the guitarist and main writer, learned a song on my commute to and from work, and auditioned for them the following week. When I turned up at the address for the audition, I found three guys with an album’s worth of material and a yearning to fill the gap left when their excellent singer departed the drum chair a year ago to take on the vocals. We start playing the epic, repeated riff that announces the mid-tempo rock song ‘Bo Huesley’. The playing is loud, immersive, and feral. It does not sound all that loud in my ears because I am wearing earplugs as I have done when drumming since I was twelve years of age. High volumes have never really been what attracted me to making rock music. I feel the most alive, though – the best alive – when making the movements required to make loud rock music authentically on the drums in a band,23 and especially in a rehearsal space.24
Férdia Stone-Davis describes the physical character of musical experience ‘disclos[ing] a first-order mode of being, one that involves a suspension of the distinction between subject and object (promoting instead their mutuality), or, rather, a retrieval of the pre-reflective moment before this distinction asserts itself’.25 I have previously described how:
When I am drumming, this feeling in my body, and the conscious, embodied knowledge that I am core to the band creating and perpetuating the sound that I hear and feel around me, compel me to continue making the music, making and luxuriating in the perpetual now.26
The sound envelopes me while I play, while the band all plays together. Everyone is into it – laying down fat, fat beats and riffs that are all we are in that moment. I recall Theodore Gracyk’s description of ‘rock creat[ing] a cocoon of sound’, which, ‘physical and sensual, felt and heard … invites us to crank the volume and overwhelm consciousness’.27 Gracyk was writing about the experience of hearing rock music, which is magnified when also creating that sound.28 This all resonates with the ‘authenticity of expression, or what I also term “first person authenticity”’ identified by Alan F. Moore, which ‘arises when an originator (composer, performer) succeeds in conveying the impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity, that it represents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form’.29 For Moore, that communication happens between performer(s) and audience, but I recognize this phenomenon as occurring between band members who are playing for themselves, not necessarily performing.
When we finished rehearsing in Tony the bass player’s converted garage rehearsal space (and man cave), I said aloud to no one in particular ‘It feels really good!’ Tony agreed, adding that ‘it takes you off the planet for a while – it’s peaceful’. Tony was right – everything else melted away while we played and we shared an immersive, collective experience that none of us could create without the others. As I have noted previously:
When I am drumming, this feeling in my body, and the conscious, embodied knowledge that I am core to the band creating and perpetuating the sound that I hear and feel around me, compel me to continue making the music, making and luxuriating in the perpetual now.30
On this evening, I got the distinct impression from the others that all experienced the same feeling. This unmediated, non-verbal communication of rocking out collaboratively was a tonic for my soul, reminding me how and why playing drums in a rock band is so vital to me being a human – so core to my eudaimonia.
One aspect I love about playing original music is that I get to create or individualize my drum parts and I get to decide when they are right. Subbing in for a band’s regular drummer leaves me anxious that I will not play the things that I should at the tempo that I should, and that the band will be unhappy, or at best unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable, with my playing. Similarly, playing cover songs is fun, but it is never fully satisfying as I know I do not sound like the commercial release of the original that audiences and band members want to hear. When I make up the drum parts and play them like only I can, it is all so much easier to get right. It is also affirming and reassuring when bandmates tell me, as they did after this audition/rehearsal, things like ‘you got the groove, bro!’ and ‘we’re so happy you’re in the band’. As far I’m concerned, the groove is created collectively, and I am elated to be in the band – drumming alone is not the same (although it can be fulfilling in a whole set of other ways, as I explore below).31
Playing in a rock band such as Black Belt Jesus fills a need that is core to my sense of who I am, and recalls ‘Erikson’s definition of identity as “the style of one’s individuality … that … coincides with the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for significant others in the immediate community”’.32 While it is early to consider men I have now rehearsed with twice ‘significant others’ in the traditional sense, they are truly significant in terms of the role they now play, and moreover, the role they enable me to play, in my life. June Boyce-Tillman captures the singularity of this drumming experience:
I am calling the moment when all the other domains fuse in a single experience – a time when body, mind, spirit, and emotions come together – Spirituality … Spirituality represents the reintegration of the body (Materials), the emotions (Expression), the reason/intellect (Construction), and the culture (Values).33
Playing in a rock band such as Black Belt Jesus is for me, then, a spiritual experience.
Personal Practice
I am immensely fortunate to have somewhere at home to practise my drums. I cannot play very loudly as they are set up in my garage, which is not isolated or insulated for sound. This has proven rather wonderful, though, as it presents me with the opportunity to play with brushes and light sticks and to coax more nuanced and delicate combinations of sounds from the kit than are typical of the ‘tub-thumping’ approach I take to the rock drumming that would ordinarily be my go-to. I have a rubber pads drum kit set up in the garage too, on which I have done the majority of my personal practice for over twenty years. This is where I practise rock music; the pads are aesthetically disappointing to play, but perfect for working through big, fast motions and learning song structures without inviting noise complaints from neighbors or the property owners association.
A wonderfully gratifying aspect of playing and practising drums is that I get to control the experience. I decide when to start, when to stop, what to play, how to play it, what my goals are, how long I have to reach them, and all the while my physical, emotional, and mental faculties are having the time of their lives. I quickly become bored and irritable if not stimulated, and become impatient and angry if I feel demands being made on me are unreasonable, so being in control of what I do helps to keep me in or approaching a state of flow. Better yet, the time that I spend playing drums is nearly always uncluttered by the constant conscious mental activity that troubles the rest of my life every day. I also cannot hear the phone ringing, nor SMS, email, or social media notifications above the sound of the drums. As I note elsewhere, ‘practising provides a beautiful cocoon that shields me from the cacophony of the world’.34 I am always happier after practising drums. I am usually calmer, kinder and more focused. I feel more fulfilled. I am a better version of myself for the rest of the day, having connected with something so deeply meaningful to who I am. With the drums ready and waiting in my garage now, I am sometimes able to pop in there three or four times a day for a short session, even just for a few minutes while the kettle boils for a cup of tea.
I enjoy gradually warming up when I first play the drums on a given day and welcome the time I must allow for that process. I have been playing mostly without ear plugs in the garage because the volume is low and the practice sessions brief enough as not to pose a threat to my health. It was been wonderfully rewarding to hear the full variety of overtones produced by the drums and the beautiful, complex shimmer of the sounds from cymbals. I have luxuriated in the numerous blended sounds of my drum kit, and in teasing more from one place or another – less ride, more of the handmade crash-turned-sizzle cymbal that I made with my Dad. Appreciation of the sound of the instrument is usually lost to protective ear plugs and a rock aesthetic that privileges loudness, accuracy, and punctuation over nuance, richness, and sipping the sumptuous sibilance from the cymbals along with the width of the sound of a stick contacting a drum and leaving the air alive with bountiful, colourful tones. It is like savouring the tastes of a perfectly prepared meal, where each morsel is gorgeous and the flavours from foods combine with one another while the sommelier’s perfectly paired selection of wine creates sensations utterly sublime.
It has been a joy to feel the stick in my hand playing jazz time on the ride cymbal, the bounce-and-rebound of the double-stroke, and the finger control of playing three rapid notes in a row – techniques that are largely lost to me when I play less technically sophisticated rock music. It has also been wonderful to reconnect with the delicate swish of a brush, tracking circles in constant motion around the head for that unending background swoosh, or waving rhythmically back and forth across the head to make eighth notes that are as relentless and vague as the points in time on the arc of a conductor’s baton, yet all the while the ensemble of my arms and feet and legs and hand and fingers all dance to weave coherently through time. I have been practising a one-handed roll technique I first worked on a few years ago when I had access to acoustic drum kits to practise at the college where I taught. I have not kept this up for the last seven years, so have enjoyed developing interdependence with my other limbs as they coordinate with this unfamiliar motion from my left hand operating a stick or brush on the edge of the snare drum. It is exciting and rewarding to hear the development of my playing.
Playing the drums like this is deeply sensuous – it feels selfishly indulgent because I am both making and consuming the sound. As I noted before about rock drumming, but which rings true for practising quietly alone in my garage:
Sound and touch are … not so distinct, but are bound up through perception as indistinguishable, or aspects of the same phenomenal experience. When I strike my drums, the hearing and feeling are experienced as two parts of the same sense – each is necessary to me for the other to feel real.35
Percussionist Evelyn Glennie has called hearing ‘a form of touch’ and said that we ‘hear through the body’.36 Nancy extends hearing to understanding, suggesting that somatic understanding exists ‘between a sense (that one listens to) and a truth (that one understands), although one cannot … do without the other’.37 Communing with this touch, this truth, and this understanding is a crucial component of why I play drums. I often sit at the drum kit with no particular goal in mind other than to be with the drums, and I am nearly always inspired when I do so; I cannot resist the urge to play. Even when the practice session is more mundane, I derive great satisfaction from the physical sensation of stick or brush striking drums and cymbals. I still just revel in the glorious sound and the fact that I get to produce it and hear it. Norton describes eudaimonia as the feeling of ‘being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do’, where that something feels meaningful and worthwhile.38 Playing my drums alone is for me a site of self-knowledge, self-understanding, and self-acceptance: eudaimonia.
From Autotelicity To Eudaimonia
I have attempted to show that I play the drums because I love to do so, and that the activity fulfils in me needs other than drumming. Drumming for me seems autotelic, but scratching to just beneath the surface reveals some of the complexity of which this supposed autotelicity is comprised. Drumming fulfils in me some ‘basic psychological needs, which differ conceptually and functionally from the conception of autotelicity’.39 These needs are twofold:
1. Doing something I know I can do, a place and time where I feel competent, confident, empowered and able to succeed;
2. Transcendence and transformation of my self, the ability of drumming seemingly to transport me to another plane of existence.
The examples above of Black Belt Jesus and practising alone illustrate how these two motivators for me playing drums correlate to ‘autonomy’, ‘competence’ and ‘relatedness’, the ‘three innate human needs central to motivation’ that Schmid identifies in self-determination theory.40 I play drums because of intrinsic motivation to do so, but ‘what reasons count as “intrinsic” [is] an empirical matter determined by the effects of those reasons on [my] behaviors and participatory satisfaction’.41 For me, drumming is vital to eudaimonia, rather than something that I do, or arguably even could do, explicitly and purely for its own sake. Waterman notes that ‘eudaimonia includes a constellation of subjective experiences, including feelings of rightness and centeredness in one’s actions, identity, strength of purpose, and competence’.42 Drumming holds this key to my self-actualization), individuation and identity realization.43 Per Frankel’s observation, the ‘search for meaning is the primary motivation in [one’s] life … This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.44 I play the drums in order to be me and to get the most out of being me. Playing drums is thus not an autotelic pursuit, but a eudaimonic one.
Drumming allows me to feel success. My life is full, as much adult life seems to be, of incomplete tasks and struggling to meet requirements, deadlines and expectations – emails to respond to, tax forms to file, papers to review, essays to grade, meals to make, a car to keep on the road. I meet enough expectations in an adequate enough way to get by, and in some things I possibly excel, but none of them sounds as sweet or feels as satisfying as drumming. Drumming is the one place to which I know I can return and where I know everything will be all right (and it if it isn’t, then it very soon will be, and even fixing drumming things is part of the joy, the fulfilment of it all). Rarely are such experiences construed as success; in music and music learning circles, we tend to think of commercial recognition, accrual of financial resources, celebrity, or an acknowledged display of a particular kind of artistic virtuosity as indicative of success. However, as Heidi Partti suggests, there is success in experiencing agency. I revel and take solace in the fact that in playing drums I am able to experience a modicum of such success.45 As noted above, I am a proud and true musical amateur.46
I gave a conference paper in 2019, during which I played drums in a range of styles, beginning with a rock juggernaut, moving through a hectic jazz fusion composition and finishing with a soft, slow singer-songwriter ballad.47 After the talk, a colleague approached me and said, ‘I just saw into your soul, man’. I suspected the gentleman of well-intentioned hyperbole and perhaps mild weekend intoxication, but he may actually have hit the mark – I certainly hide nothing when playing at my fullest, and on that occasion there were no barriers, no filters to the real me. Maybe I really did bare my soul. I hope so. Boyce-Tillman proposes that ‘part of self-actualization within a musical experience can be seen as the last remaining place for the soul in Western society’.48 Drumming, then, is where my soul resides.
