‘When the Levee Breaks’

In 1968, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant formed The New Yardbirds in London – and later changed the name of this band to Led Zeppelin. Their sound ranged from hard rock, heavy metal, and psychedelic rock to blues and folk. Zeppelin drew up a blueprint for generations of rockers with their mix of drums-bass-guitar-vocals, endless touring, contributions to both arena rock and album-oriented rock, theatric self-presentations onstage, and high level of musicianship. The group released their untitled fourth album – often called Zoso or IV – in November 1971. They first tried recording the album at Island Records’ Basing Street Studios, eventually returning to a combination they found successful for III. They used the Rolling Stones mobile recording studio – also used to record the Stones’ album Sticky Fingers – and Headley Grange, a structure originally built in 1795 as a House of Industry for the sick, elderly, orphans, and illegitimate children.⁵ IV contains classic Zeppelin tracks such as the raucous ‘Rock and Roll’ and the epic ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

The album’s final track, ‘When the Levee Breaks’, is Zeppelin’s take on a song that blues artists Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie wrote about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Plant’s sparse but powerful vocals soar over the drone created by Jones and Page. The groove of the song is deep and sluggish, and the main beat Bonham plays throughout the song appears in Example 14.1.

Example 14.1 Beat played by Bonham in ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (0:00)

Note: In standard drum kit notation, the bass drum appears on what in treble clef would be the F space, snare drum on C space, and hi-hat on the G above the staff.

Bonham plays this beat for nearly every section of the song. Andy Johns engineered the session, and he and Bonham recorded the drums at the bottom of a three-story tall staircase in an open hallway at Headley Grange, resulting in a classic drum sound that has been sampled by everyone from the Beastie Boys (‘Rhymin & Stealin’) and Eminem (‘Kim’) to Björk (‘Army of Me’) and Beyoncé (‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’).

The Biological Body

Johnson’s first and most narrow dimension of the human body is the body as conceptualised completely separately from the mind: ‘the body as biological organism’. He describes the biological body as follows: ‘[t]he principal physical locus of my being-in-the-world is the living, flesh-and-blood creature that I call “my body”’.⁶ Given this definition, John Bonham’s performance on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ contains a biological dimension: what his body actually did to make the drums generate sound.

This level reveals Bonham’s physicality as he enacted the beat patterns, fills, and groove. He struck the bass and snare in a call-and-response manner, with his right foot and left hand, in which the second bass drum part of the conversation has three syncopated hits. Meanwhile, Bonham kept time on the hi-hat with his right hand. All this activity would have made his heart beat faster than at resting, causing his blood to pump harder through his veins. His muscles, ligaments, and tendons tensed and released to allow bodily motion throughout his arms and legs. This extreme physical exertion may have caused him to sweat as well. While this reveals what Bonham is physically doing, the analysis of the drum pattern is fairly basic and perhaps the least insightful of Johnson’s five levels. It describes how the sounds the listener hears are generated, but it does not reveal why listeners find pleasure in this grooviest of grooves.

The Phenomenological Body

Johnson defines the phenomenological body succinctly as ‘our body as we live it and experience it’.⁷ Unfortunately for me, I did not play on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. But I can begin to understand John Bonham’s experience of drumming during the recording by turning to how it feels for me as a drummer to play this pattern, drawing on Elizabeth Le Guin’s work, which she calls ‘carnal musicology’, a connection between people who play and write about music and the composers of that music. She writes of this connection:

Le Guin’s insights prompt questions. How does my body carnally connect with John Bonham when I drum this pattern? What can my analysis gain from my experience of drumming? The answer is simple; my body feels as if it is in the ultimate state of groove.

But what does it mean to be ‘in a groove’? In Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament, Anne Danielsen wants to understand funk ‘as lived experience’.⁹ She writes, ‘[b]eing in a groove, feeling the right feeling, letting presence happen, from the inside, from a position within time, within the experiential now, this is probably what funk is all about’.¹⁰ Here, Danielsen attempts to capture in words the essence of being in a groove, and her claim could apply to many groove-based musics, including ‘When the Levee Breaks’, in which a single beat pattern takes up the vast majority of the song. When one impulse happens for such a long time in a song, it brings you into the present moment of that song in a way that songs with more defined sections do not. Rhythm magazine readers certainly agree, naming ‘When the Levee Breaks’ the ‘[g]reatest groove of all time’.¹¹ The song often ranks on lists of the most sampled breaks in hip-hop alongside legendary funk grooves such as The Winstons’ ‘Amen, Brother’ and James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’.¹²

Bonham’s infectious groove – in Example 14.1 – oozes with laid-back ease. This pattern is as unbelievably satisfying to play as it is to hear. As I play it, I connect carnally with Bonham. The basic drum pattern consists of three components. First, as in any standard backbeat pattern, the snare strikes on two and four. The tempo enables my hand to fall into place for a slow crack on the snare – where I have plenty of time to lift my left hand high and smack it down firmly in the pocket. The ever-so-slightly-open hi-hat keeps time with straight eighths, a very common way to keep time over a backbeat. At that tempo, my right hand can remain loose in a way that it cannot at some fast or even mid tempos, allowing for a slack push-and-pull in the groove. The bass drum simply pounds on beat one for the first half of the pattern, leaving loads of aural space until the first snare crack on beat two.

The true magic happens with the bass drum in the latter part of the one-measure pattern. The bass drum feels early, entering a sixteenth note before beat three and making my body sway a bit as I play it – yearning not so much with anticipation, but with pleasure. The ‘early’ hit feels natural, almost necessary, because of the groove’s depth and almost sluggish tempo. Difficult to get just in the sweet spot, this early bass drum hit’s payoff is simply euphoric. Beat three aches because of the absence of the bass drum, which flirts with the beat but never touches it. Then, I anticipate the snare backbeat on four with a couple gallops of the bass drum, filling in significantly more of the space in the second part of the measure than the first.

But one musical element both enriches and complicates the phenomenological dimension of this analysis: tempo. I cannot connect fully to Bonham’s bodily experience of playing because I do not know at what tempo he recorded this beat. The wash of the cymbal indicates that the drums were recorded faster and slowed down for the track – but I can only confirm this because of my experience as a drummer, who has heard and played so many cymbals throughout my life.¹³ When my body plays along with the recording, my physicality does not actually enact the pattern in the way that Bonham does on the record. The link between his phenomenological experience and mine is not broken, but it is fractured. Still, the result of this phenomenological layer of analysis is a deep, pleasurable groove for the listening experience.

The Ecological Body

The final three dimensions all relate to environment – ecological, social, and cultural. Johnson takes into account the environment because ‘[h]uman mind and meaning require at least a partially functioning human brain within at least a partially functioning human body that is in ongoing interaction with complex environments that are at once physical, social, and cultural. These environments both shape and are shaped by the humans who inhabit them’.¹⁴ Under the third dimension – the ecological body – he explains, ‘[t]here is no body without an environment, no body without the ongoing flow of organism-environment interaction that defines our realities’.¹⁵ Our interactions with the world define and shape our bodies. In the case of ‘Levee’, I turn to two factors of ecological environment: the physical, architectural space around the drums at the famous recording spot Headley Grange, and the sonic space created by the Binson echo unit used in production.

The physical reverberation of the stone walls of Headley Grange ‘had a significant impact on the sound. Because stone is, acoustically speaking, a highly non-absorbent material, the sound waves were reflected within the stairwell with a greater intensity than if the walls were composed of a more absorbent material’.¹⁶ But the engineers still needed to capture the natural echo on record. Andy Johns remembers hanging ‘two ambient Beyer M160 stereo microphones over the kit, one 10 feet up, the other about 20’.¹⁷ This mic placement in combination with the open, echo-producing stone structure gave the drums a fabricated live sound.

Do not confuse this physical echo with the sixteenth-note delay on the track. For that, Johns went beyond the literal space of Headley Grange to layer a sonic space onto the already-complex body/environment Bonham enacted with his drumming. Outside, in the Rolling Stones mobile studio, Johns put the drums into two channels, compressed them, and ran the signal through a Binson echo unit: a machine owned by Jimmy Page that used an analogue magnetic drum recorder to produce a signal delay.¹⁸ This machine – not the natural echo of Headley Grange – translates to the delay that falls a sixteenth note after each drum hit. Example 14.2 shows the result, which is closer to what the listener actually hears.

Example 14.2 Heard Beat Pattern for ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (0:00)

Because the delay lands exactly a sixteenth note after the physical hits, it ends up sounding like John Bonham is playing ghost notes after every snare and bass hit – the key component that makes the beat so unique. This delay adds texture to the sounds, creating a spatial effect of being in an even bigger, more echo-filled space than Headley Grange – a canyon, perhaps. The large space between the hits allowing for the sixteenth-note delay also creates a disconnect between what Bonham’s biological body enacts and what the listener ends up hearing and connecting to, which is Bonham’s bodily engagement with both physical and technological environments.

In the early 1970s – an era when most drummers dampened their drums and engineers recorded them with close microphones – the full, life-like sound that Bonham and Johns produced stands out. It forges a bond between listener, Bonham, and the multiple spaces of the song. The physical spaces of John Bonham’s drum kit and Headley Grange affect the listening experience, but so does the virtual space of the Binson Echo unit. Together, they create a new space that only exists in ‘When the Levee Breaks’.

The Social Body

All of the previous levels ended with a consideration of the listener, leading us to Johnson’s fourth level: the social body. He writes, ‘[t]he human environment of which the body partakes is not just physical or biological. It is also composed of intersubjective relations and coordinations of experience’.¹⁹ For ‘When the Levee Breaks’, the biological body is the force that generates the sounds that the listener hears. The phenomenological body allows listeners and performers to carnally connect to the groove of the song. The multifaceted spaces surrounding the recording of the drums affect the ecological body.

Significantly, Bonham’s body, manipulated technologically by Johns (another agent), interacts with the listener – though not in real time. When listeners can’t help but move to ‘When the Levee Breaks’, their bodies connect to more than Bonham’s physical, biological body, even more than the phenomenological experience of simply being in the groove; they connect to the reverberant, stone-walled space of Headley Grange and to the technological space that allowed for a perfect delay that fit smack dab in the middle of those wide open spaces between drum hits. Perhaps this explains why Led Zeppelin only played ‘Levee’ in concert a few times: the technological environment required for the groove and feel of the track – which went beyond Bonham’s drums to include tempo manipulation, panning, and a backward echo effect on the harmonica – could not be adequately recreated in a live setting in the 1970s. The magic just didn’t translate.

The Cultural Body

The listener cannot find meaning in ‘When the Levee Breaks’ if it exists in a vacuum. Johnson’s fifth and final dimension, the cultural body, provides the greater context that makes the first four dimensions matter. Johnson explains:

The main culture that affects ‘When the Levee Breaks’ and its relation to Bonham’s body is Western rock music. And the backbeat occupies a central cultural locus of meaning in Western rock drumming. In another essay in this volume, Steven Baur calls the backbeat ‘one of the single most prevalent features of Western popular music’.²¹ Audiences learned to expect and desire the backbeat well before the rock era, and it gained cultural power when both its adherents and detractors emphasised its centrality to the new sound during the 1950s Big Bang of rock and roll.²² People figured out how to move to it and the seemingly endless patterns in which it can occur not only through its affective dimensions, but also, through cultural institutions of rock such as variety shows (e.g. Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle), dance music party shows (e.g. American Bandstand, Soul Train), and live concerts. In many ways, the backbeat is rock culture; it is how our bodies culturally interact with rock music.

I want to distinguish between the backbeat and what I call the backbeat pattern. The backbeat is the accent on the weak beats of the measure – in standard 4/4, beats two and four – most often played in rock by the snare drum. The backbeat pattern includes the backbeat itself, but also two other components. The bass drum falls on or around beats one and three and creates a call and response pattern with the snare backbeat. For the final component, drummers designate an instrument – often a cymbal – to perform a steady time-keeping function.

In his essay on soul music, Robert Fink demonstrates that rhythmic goal direction occurs in popular music, that a single song can exhibit both groove and teleology, and that certain beat patterns can serve as a rhythmic ‘tonic’ that allows for patterns of tension and release. For his example of this phenomenon, he looks at another core beat pattern: the Motown four-on-the-floor pattern.²³ Drummers apply this tactic in all genres and styles, and rock drummers most often manipulate audience expectations of the backbeat pattern. I term the core groove of a given song – that beat that the drummer plays that feels like ‘home’ – the tonic beat pattern. A song’s tonic beat pattern is often some variation of the backbeat pattern, or of another core stylistic beat pattern – i.e. disco four-on-the-floor, train beat, or reggae. While multiple variations of the backbeat might appear in a particular song, each song only has one true tonic beat pattern.

Drummers go away from, and return to, the tonic beat pattern to design these tension and release patterns in several ways, and this is the crux of the Tonic Beat Pattern Theory. It can take place on a small scale when, say, drummers build tension through drum fills. These embellishments instill unease in the listener because they momentarily obscure the integrity of the tonic beat pattern, temporarily compromising the song’s underlying stability. For this reason, fills regularly lead into new sections of the songs, as they make the return of a beat that much more satisfying. In Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, for example, Dave Grohl uses largely sixteenth-note-based snare drum fills to transition between sections. He plays a steady backbeat pattern through the verse, modifies it slightly for the pre-chorus, and plays loud sixteenth notes to build tension before the explosion of the chorus, where he plays a louder, more complex backbeat pattern. In effect, Grohl establishes a steady beat, uses a fill to create tension, and then releases that tension through going into another steady beat.²⁴

The Tonic Beat Pattern Theory also works on a larger scale. Some drummers withhold a steady backbeat for a section of a song, often saving it for the chorus. Benny Benjamin’s thumping tom-tom pattern emphasises beats one and three in verse one of Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’, eliminating the backbeat and the snare altogether. When the chorus pattern comes in with snare backbeat on two and tom backbeat on four, it feels utterly resolved. Other drummers take this practice to its logical conclusion by holding back that which becomes a tonic beat pattern for minutes of a song. In Hole’s ‘Violet’, Patty Schemel alternates two patterns: one obscures the backbeat by offsetting the first snare hit a half a beat, while in the other, she simply plays a quiet four-on-the-floor bass with uneven rim clicks on the snare. These patterns feel partially resolved at times – particularly after interruptive drum fills – but there is clearly something missing. In the very last chorus, she unleashes that ever-gratifying, full-blown backbeat almost three minutes into the song – finally supplying the listener with the song’s tonic beat pattern. Try as I may, I cannot find a single tune in rock music that has drumming that does not adhere to the Tonic Beat Pattern Theory. These tension and release patterns work always and only culturally. They are the primary way that drummers shape musical meaning and steer the narrative in rock music.²⁵

‘When the Levee Breaks’ is no exception, and applying the Tonic Beat Pattern Theory to it reveals deeper meanings than Johnson’s first four levels. The tonic beat pattern as played by Bonham appears in Example 14.1, whereas the tonic beat pattern as heard appears in Example 14.2. The form diagram of the song appears in Table 14.1.

The song contains two large-scale iterations of essentially the same thing – instrumental verse, interlude, verse, interlude, bridge – bookended by an intro and outro. The song lacks any true chorus, significantly, which contributes to the drone-like feeling of the piece, as does the literal drone in the guitar and bass in the intro, verses, and outro. The tonic beat pattern occurs even more frequently than the drone part – in every section except the two bridges and every other measure in the interludes. Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum performs an analysis of the song’s recording techniques and production to make a fairly convincing argument that drums, bass, and rhythm guitar signify the rising rain water, the villain that threatens to break the levee.²⁶ However, my reading takes into account these tension and release patterns, as well as the cultural signification of the backbeat, to argue that the drums signify the steadfast levee itself.

Bonham always plays the same fill at the ends of the verses, transcribed in Example 14.3.

Example 14.3 Fill at the end of the verses in ‘When the Levee Breaks’ as played by Bonham (1:03)

Notice that this simple fill contains the tonic beat pattern within it, with three extra snare hits added. Incorporating the tonic beat pattern within the fill makes it less disorienting than, say, some kind of highly syncopated fill. The listener still knows where the backbeat and groove fall. Through the extra snare hits, you can start to hear points in the levee crack and erode. These fills also signal a formal change into the interludes.

In the interludes, a slight variation on the tonic beat pattern alternates with a ‘Ba-DOO’ punching figure where snare falls on every beat. This ‘Ba-DOO’ punching figure proves particularly jarring for three reasons: the main groove is so infectious, the tonic beat pattern saturates the track, and many of Bonham’s deviations still contain the tonic beat pattern within them. The levee here endures major hits as the tide charges forth every other measure, and more jolting, intense cracking of the levee ensues. The first three of these punching deviations lead into silence. Here, in the silence, the tide has temporarily gone out, and the levee gets a much-needed break from its hard work of holding back the villainous rain.

But the final ‘Ba-DOO’ punching figure in the last interlude occurs before the second bridge, in which the drums deviate significantly from the first bridge. Instead of a measure of silence and a measure of crashes with bass drum hits, the second bridge kicks right into a backbeat pattern with an active bass drum. Add to that the fact that the second bridge features significantly more virtuosic drum fills than the first – including a thirty-second note fill and Bonham’s signature bouncing-bass-drum-snare-sextuplet combo – and this section comes to represent the point where the levee starts to surrender to leakage and overtopping. The water is making headway. This struggle continues into the outro, with another sextuplet fill and a few rolls on the snare. Then in the middle of a measure, the tonic beat pattern abruptly stops. The levee has reached catastrophic failure through massive collapse. Water flows freely, and the vocalist’s fears have come true. The listener can only hope he actually started his journey to Chicago before it was too late.

Just as Liu-Rosenbaum showed how close attention to recording practices can help understand ‘Levee’, my analysis shows how close consideration of drums can contradict those meanings. In his reading, the backbeat is the water – the dangerous antagonist. The drums in this song do not feel dangerous at all, however; the backbeat rarely does to fans. The backbeat in general, and the tonic beat pattern in ‘Levee’ specifically, feel pleasurable, comforting, and reliable – like an old friend. They constitute what audiences have come to expect through decades of reinforcement. In Mark Johnson’s chapter about music in The Meaning of the Body, he states, ‘music is meaningful because it can present the flow of human experience, feeling, and thinking in concrete, embodied forms – and this is meaning in its deepest sense’.²⁷ Throughout ‘When the Levee Breaks’, John Bonham does just that – by harnessing the cultural, bodily signifying abilities of the backbeat, he crafts the song’s narrative and contributes to its affective meanings.

The Power of the Drums

In ‘“The Pride of Noise”: Drums and Their Repercussions in Early Modern England’, Christopher Marsh writes about the myriad signifying possibilities of the drum at that time, demonstrating how drums were used as powerful communication tools. He writes:

For Marsh, the drum held immense power to communicate in Early Modern England. In rock, the same thing holds true; listeners absorb the narratives that drummers weave by a kind of cultural osmosis. Through their lifetime’s worth of knowledge of, and experience with, the tension and release patterns drummers craft, rock fans are expert listeners and interpreters of the moves drummers make. When session drummer Hal Blaine omits half the backbeats on his iconic ‘Boom … boom boom CRACK’ beat pattern at the beginning of the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’ and then resolves that tension by playing all backbeats in the chorus, and when Meg White withholds the powerful crash cymbal timekeeper until the choruses of the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’, they show how drummers create musical trajectories in songs that not only make fans wiggle our hips, move our feet, and bang our heads, but also, create just about any affect the song calls for.

My hope for this essay is that it provides popular music scholars the necessary theory and methods to weave drummers’ musical contributions more fully into the conversation. The Tonic Beat Pattern Theory provides insights into just about any song in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries that has anything meant to fill the role of a drummer: from acoustic and electronic drum kits to drum machines and computer patches. We can no longer ignore or diminish the instrument that most urges people to move and groove and connects to their bodies. In the words of James Brown, ‘give the drummer some’.

Introduction

What is especially significant about this ableist mid-1990s popular culture reference is that Def Leppard’s Rick Allen has long been the public face of the disabled drummer. As the Bloodhound Gang’s lyrics make clear, Allen has more often than not been identified primarily by his disability (e.g. ‘the one-armed drummer’ and so on), as opposed to by his name, or solely by his role (e.g. ‘the drummer’). Like some disabled musicians that came before him such as Chick Webb, Django Reinhardt, and Ray Charles, Allen’s disability is visible, and as a result, for many in the music-consuming public, his disability defines him more so than his musicianship. Such perceptions are typically tied to the tired trope of overcoming disability, which is rooted in an implicitly or explicitly held belief in a normal body,¹ and that it ought to conform to the built environment such as musical instruments, and more specifically in our case, the drum kit. In the case of music, this ‘normal performance body’ is above-average with regard to the musculature and dexterity needed to play an instrument.² Applying this theory to the drum kit, drummers are presumed to play their instrument with two hands and two feet.

In this chapter we examine the intersection of drumming and disability. Whilst Rick Allen is undoubtedly the most famous drummer with a disability, he is certainly not the only drummer with a disability. The World Health Organization estimates that fifteen percent of the global population have disabilities, and therefore by extension we can safely presume that many drummers do or will experience disability at some point in their lifetimes.³ By seeking to learn about the experiencers of other drummers with disabilities, the drumming community can broaden and deepen its understanding of how disabilities affect drumming, if at all. To this end, what began as a conversation initiated by adam wanting to learn from Cornel about his experiences drumming as a person with disabilities soon morphed into this co-authored chapter on drumming and disability. Our research process took the form of the following stages: First, we engaged in multiple semi-structured conversations to generate possible themes and topics to examine at the confluence of drumming and disability.⁴ These conversations were then transcribed to text and analysed for their most salient ideas. We mutually agreed upon how we would address or illustrate the key ideas we wish to communicate in this medium, and settled on the overarching concept of how disability, drumming, and the drum kit intersect with each other. Using narrative sections written by Cornel about his experiences as a drummer with a disability, we apply concepts from the field of disability studies to drum kit studies and consider the significance of our discussion for the drumming community at large.

We commence our chapter with a discussion of relevant concepts from the field of disability studies. We presume readers may not have engaged with disability studies literature, and therefore we provide a brief primer on core concepts from the field such as the medical and social models of disability, relevant critiques of these paradigms as they relate to drumming, and how they influence societal perspectives on drumming.

Drumming and Disability Studies

In the interest of brevity, our summary of disability studies as it relates to drumming is admittedly condensed. Our aim is to provide sufficient foundational information such that readers with little to no familiarity with the field of disability studies can grasp some of the basic concepts and terms employed throughout the chapter. As a starting point, both the terminology itself and the understandings of terms within the field of disability studies are contentious;⁵ it is like the jazz of academic fields: there is no resolve. Entering into the field of disability studies is less like wading into warm waters and more like a polar bear plunge: it is invigorating, awakening, and for some, a shock to the system. In Western societies, we tend to accept the idea that there are ‘average’ things such as bodies, but, ‘there is no such thing as average body size … Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention’.⁶ Disability studies scholars point out that our conceptions of ‘average’ or ‘normal’ are unfounded yet continue to deeply influence our understanding of the construct of disability. During the nineteenth century, ‘Medical knowledge determined the boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” individuals’ and by the end of that century, ‘the individual approach to disability located in medical knowledge was widely accepted … It focused on bodily “abnormality”, disorder or deficiency and how this “causes” functional limitation or “disability”’.⁷ This line of thinking that centres on the individual as disabled is what is commonly referred to as the medical model of disability.

In contrast, the social model of disability, takes aim at the failings of society to support people with impairments – bodily differences – which as a result leads to experiences of disability:

Pitted as binary opposites, applying medical- and social-model thinking to drumming and disability lead to rather limiting understandings. In practice, if a drummer and drum kit are seemingly ergonomically incompatible, we do not attempt to adjust one or the other, we do both. Drumming is but one activity in a long list that exposes the inadequacy of either/or medical- and social-model thinking. More nuanced understandings based on peoples’ lived experiences help to make sense of disability theory, and we use examples from Cornel’s life as a drummer to highlight the importance of complexity and context. In particular, Tobin Siebers’ conception of ‘complex embodiment’ as a way of understanding disability as the result of both the effects of the environment and the effects of the body meshes well with Cornel’s perspectives on drumming and disability.⁹

Drumming, Disability, and Social Media

We proceed with a narrative by Cornel on how he has experienced others’ perceptions of him through his online presence on various internet and social media platforms. Notably, ‘while social media is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, its impact on people with disabilities has gone largely unscrutinized’.¹⁰ By having Cornel present his perspective in the first person we gain valuable insights into his experience as a drummer with an online presence and how others’ perceptions of his disability are expressed to him and affect him.

Cornel’s experiences of being the object of others’ inspiration porn or trolling on social media highlight how difficult it is for him to be regarded solely as a drummer; instead, he is compartmentalized as a ‘disabled drummer’:

Cornel Plays ‘Everlong’

Given that Cornel wishes his drumming to be perceived as something that he does as opposed to something that he is, we proceed with a description of how he plays his drum kit, which requires some contextualization. We begin with Cornel describing his disability and how it affects his drumming. Following, Cornel describes his approach to playing ‘Everlong’ (1997) by Foo Fighters, a rite of passage for many drummers as it requires considerable experience and practice to rival the performance of the original recording by Dave Grohl or the live performances of Taylor Hawkins. To the reader we pose this question: in the act of playing ‘Everlong’ on his drum kit, is Cornel disabled? From an auditory-only perspective, if the same notes are being played, there would be no way of knowing about Cornel’s disability. But, in our visual-centric society, watching Cornel play his drums in addition to hearing him play them is integral to the listening experience. How we see Cornel play drums changes how we hear him play drums. As Cornel explains, understanding how he plays ‘Everlong’ necessitates not only a description of his performance, but also his disability and his drum kit:

Enacting Evolution on the Drum Kit

Considering Cornel’s explication of his approach to drumming ‘Everlong’, it is clear that he engaged in a thoughtful and complex process to determine the optimal approach for himself to play this particular song. While Cornel’s drum kit setup for ‘Everlong’ deviates from the supposed ‘standard’ drum kit configuration, the changes he makes to the standard configuration are less than those required by a left-handed drummer because the standard configuration presumes right-handedness. Despite this fact, in Cornel’s experience, observers of his drumming tend to pay more attention to his body than his drum kit. Such a perspective exemplifies medical model thinking as the focus is on the individual as opposed to the environment (the drum kit in this case). Following, Cornel details how he is often compared to Rick Allen of Def Leppard, and explains why this comparison is problematic when we compare their respective approaches to playing the drum kit:

Cornel has to adjust his drum kit to his body, but also adjust his body to his drum kit in order to play. Is this statement not true for any drummer? We forward that drumming inherently requires ‘complex embodiment’, a blend of medical and social model thinking about being in our environment (i.e. playing the drum kit). In comparison, many other musical instruments are much less modifiable and therefore either exclude a potential player due to bodily difference or demand the player adapt to it. And, while other musical instruments may be adapted or modified, they are often singled out for being just that, such as the one-handed bass guitar.¹² The drum kit requires no qualifying terms – there is no one-handed drum kit even though there are one-handed drummers.

The construct of a drum kit is in flux – it can take on many different configurations and be made of many different materials and yet be recognized and referred to simply as a drum kit. Why this might be is beyond the scope of this chapter, but we suspect that the drum kit’s relative newness compared to other musical instruments that have arrived at fairly fixed designs over time helps to explain this phenomenon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, all of the elements that comprise a drum kit as we now know it existed, but they were not played together by one person.¹³ The drum kit has a history of being amorphous and modular – components can be added or subtracted yet it will still be acknowledged by both drummers and non-drummers as a drum kit. Some of the technological advances of the drum kit have afforded evolved and new techniques,¹⁴ but for drummers with disabilities, it is often the necessity to deviate from the norm – not artistic aims nor the recognition of the possibilities afforded by new technologies – that drive innovation. While the modularity of the drum kit is an important factor in making it accessible to people with disabilities, how disabled drummers are able to adapt techniques, often in personalized ways, is also an important factor to consider.¹⁵ Not only does adapting tried-and-trusted techniques make playing the drum kit more accessible, it also challenges established ideas about technique and opens up previously undiscovered possibilities of the instrument. In this way, all drummers are engaged in a critical role of evolving the very conceptualization of the instrument itself because our instruments are extensions of ourselves.¹⁶

Final Fill: Conclusions

Perhaps it is not possible to completely bridge the disparity of which Cornel speaks, but drummers can and will play a pivotal role in how the intersection of disability and drumming is perceived; it is imperative and inevitable. Given that 1 billion of the people on this planet will experience disability at some point in their lifetime, Cornel’s case is not an anomaly. The specifics of Cornel’s disability and how it affects his drumming may be unique, but the broader idea that drummers will experience disability playing the drum kit is not. Cornel’s case exemplifies that, ‘Having a disability is something that makes you different, but not something that by itself makes you worse off because of that difference. Being disabled is simply something that makes you a minority – it is a way of having a minority body’.¹⁷

Cornel’s approach to playing ‘Everlong’ is different than that of Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins, but does this difference constitute ‘disabled drumming’? Who decides? Whom does it affect? Why does it matter? These are questions that drummers need to contemplate both for themselves and for those they mentor. Kat Holmes observes, ‘As we age, we all gain and lose abilities. Our abilities change through illness and injury. Eventually, we all are excluded by designs that don’t fit our ever-changing bodies’.¹⁸ As we have detailed, the infrastructure of the drum kit can potentially be changed to accommodate our ever-changing bodies. How far from the standard configuration of a drum kit can we deviate before we cross the undefined threshold of dis/ability? If we cannot adapt our drum kits to our changing bodies, can we adapt our drumming techniques? Aspiring to be a lifelong drummer demands an acceptance of the reality that our bodies change over time.

Beyond the physical, disability not only dictates how a drummer plays, but how a drummer is perceived. The drummer’s identity hangs in the balance of public perception, be it on social media or elsewhere. A disability identity may be chosen by an individual, assigned by a government agency, or presumed by others – in all cases, disability identity, whether a drummer chooses it or not, affects how they are perceived as a drummer. Considering how disability affects drummers physically and socially, if we are not already, we drummers ought to be ever-conscious of our own complex embodiment, and continually contemplate how to navigate the intersection of disability, drumming, and the drum kit.

Introduction

According to musicologist Rita Steblin, the masculinization of the drums has roots extending as far back as the Renaissance.¹ In the fifteenth century, European sensibilities discouraged women from playing physically demanding percussion instruments in favour of quieter, more subdued (and thus feminine) instruments such as psalteries and lutes. This very same sentiment is alive and well still today, making the drum kit one of the most explicitly gendered instruments in Western popular music. The result is that, at both the professional and amateur levels, women and gender minority drummers remain severely underrepresented. For instance, in 2011 Rolling Stone magazine created a list of the top 100 drummers of all time and featured zero women. The magazine subsequently published another list in 2016, this time increasing the number of women drummers to five. And Modern Drummer, the industry’s most widely-read magazine published monthly since January 1977, has featured only eight women on its cover – with three of those covers sharing space with men. To be sure, there are more than a few examples of accomplished women drummers: Karen Carpenter, Sheila E, Terri-Lyne Carrington, and Cindy Blackman-Santana, among many others. Yet these women are the exception and not the rule, which suggests the ongoing need for women to mobilize as a distinct drumming community.

Like other communities of interest, social media offers a space to do so. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Instagram: a social media platform that affords participation through both photos and video. ‘Drumming Instagram’ is a vibrant online community where drummers share photos of their gear and performance venues, videos of their practice routines, live performances, and jam sessions, and other moments in their professional and personal lives. Here, users can learn about new performers; acquire new skills and techniques; find inspiration; and offer support to others on their musical journeys. For women, Drumming Instagram does all these things while also enabling a form of public visibility and real-time interaction with other drummers that has not been otherwise possible. As a result, drummers like Anika Nilles (@anika.nilles), Taylor Gordon (@thepocketqueen), and Sarah Thawer (@sarahtdrumguru) (among many others!) have gained recognition within the professional drumming scene, in large part because of their vibrant social media presence. These artists are among the most followed drummers on Instagram regardless of gender, and their contributions have gone a long way for inspiring other up-and-coming women drummers globally. The momentum surrounding the participation of professional and amateur women drummers offers a form of networked visibility that makes Instagram a productive space to challenge the historically gendered norms of drum kit performance.

This networked visibility, however, is highly ambivalent. Just as Drumming Instagram supports women’s participation in a traditionally male-dominated musical domain, it also sets them up for public scrutiny and unwanted attention. From gendered critiques of their performances to sexual objectification, the participatory nature of social media presents a series of challenges that are specific to the experiences of women drummers. In light of these challenges, we ask, what is the range of public responses to women’s visibility on Drumming Instagram? What are the social norms and codes that guide participation in this networked public? And is Instagram a space where an emancipatory feminist politics can emerge? To answer these questions, we examined three notable Instagram accounts dedicated to the promotion of women drummers: @femaledrummers, @tomtommag, and @hitlikeagirlcontest. While they differ in terms of their publishing aims and approaches, each account functions as a community hub while highlighting how Drumming Instagram is a contested site of meaning and power. Borrowing from feminist literature on the politics of online visibility, we argue that visibility is a currency that both legitimizes women on Drumming Instagram while simultaneously rendering them more vulnerable to public scrutiny and unwanted attention. The digital drum kit performance space may make it easy for women to be seen, but it remains challenging for feminists to be heard.

Emergent Online Communities and Popular Feminism

This study of women’s participation on Drumming Instagram builds upon a series of distinct, yet interrelated bodies of literature. Among them are studies of gender, sexuality, and musical performance developed in the sociology of music.² Over the past several decades, questions of gender and sexuality have offered an important conceptual framework for the study of musical subcultures,³ particular celebrities,⁴ and audiences alike.⁵ Alongside this body of research, scholars have also raised questions about music education and participation, and how gender mediates the “acceptability” of instruments for particular groups of people.⁶ This discussion extends into women’s instrumental performance in contemporary music, although work in this area tends to highlight the role of guitarists, bassists, and vocalists at the expense of drummers.⁷ Layne Redmond’s When the Drummers Were Women (1997), Meghan Georgina Aube’s dissertation Women in Percussion (2011), Angela Smith’s Women Drummers (2014), and most recently, Matt Brennan’s Kick It: The Social History of the Drum Kit (2020) are notable exceptions, offering revisionist histories that question the gendered norms of contemporary drumming culture. Our research contributes to this body of literature by examining an emergent drumming community where gender plays a central role. However, we do so by considering musical performance through the lens of digital media, which is a (and perhaps the) primary channel for the circulation of popular music.⁸

For this reason, we also borrow from existing research in the area of feminist media studies. As feminism has enjoyed a ‘new luminosity in popular culture’ scholars have considered the political implications of this growing visibility.⁹ Although the proliferation of images of strong and powerful women in media and advertising is indeed a welcome departure from the past, it has the potential to give rise to a postfeminist sentiment that sexism no longer exists and collective struggle is no longer necessary.¹⁰ Feminist scholarship remains largely ambivalent to this notion, which is made tangible by ‘hashtag feminism’: a media practice that has fundamentally altered how we discuss gender and sexism, who participates in that conversation, and what types of political actions are possible.¹¹ Generating visibility and attention through the deployment of buzzwords and catchy political slogans while encouraging others to signal boost its message in the hopes of ‘going viral’, hashtag feminism is a type of performative politics that aims to disrupt the status quo by presenting an alternative version of the world (i.e. #YesAllWomen, #MeToo). However, like other identity-based movements, scholars have questioned whether this emphasis on visibility and attention overshadows structural inequities.¹² In other words, a demand for visibility and recognition within a system may come at the expense of dismantling or even challenging that system.

Feminist media scholarship also reminds us that visibility may at times even run counter to feminist goals. Under late capitalism, feminism can become vulnerable to co-optation and commodification when marketers regularly use images of ‘empowered’ women to sell everything from soap to clothing and cosmetics in the name of feminism.¹³ Visibility can also engender certain kinds of vulnerability, with Larisa Kingston Mann listing the male gaze¹⁴ and the hypervisibility of black female bodies¹⁵ as examples where visibility itself is not necessarily liberatory.¹⁶ This becomes particularly clear when we consider the paradoxically symbiotic relationship between ‘popular feminism’ – a feminism widely accessible across the mediascape – and ‘popular misogyny’.¹⁷ As part of the contemporary backlash against feminism, popular misogyny aims to silence women who ‘make too much noise’.¹⁸ In this sense, popular feminism in digital culture refers to media content meant to be seen rather than political demands that are meant to be heard.

Although the scholarly discussion about the politics of online feminism is robust, its applicability to women’s online drumming communities is not quite so straightforward. Most of the existing scholarly discussion concerns women as media consumers and not as content producers.¹⁹ And when it does consider women as producers of digital content, it mainly applies to young women engaged in explicitly feminist activities online.²⁰ In the case of women’s online drumming communities, and Drumming Instagram in particular, women are both the producers and consumers of media content. Commodities may be a part of the discussion (through mention of specific brands of sticks, drums, cymbals, or other performance accessories), but do not figure as prominently as in other online communities such as influencer marketing spaces. And although the visibility of women performers in the highly male-dominated world of drumming is not politically insignificant, the motivations of women posting their videos may not be as explicitly political as those of young feminists aiming to confront sexism and misogyny in 140 characters or less. Taking this into consideration, we ask the following questions: What is the range of public responses to women’s visibility on Drumming Instagram? What are the social norms and codes guiding participation in this networked public? And is Instagram a space where an emancipatory feminist politics can emerge?

Method: A Content Analysis of Drumming Instagram

Our analysis is based on an examination of three popular Instagram accounts dedicated to the promotion of women drummers: @femaledrummers (~75k followers), @tomtommag (~15k followers), and @hitlikeagirlcontest (~5,300 followers). @femaledrummers is the largest community-based account for women drummers on Instagram. Rather than developing original content, @femaledrummers amplifies individual performers’ content by reposting one-minute videos of amateurs and professionals alike. Launched in 2016, the @femaledrummers Instagram account (and corresponding website) has since accrued a steadily growing audience that – at the time of our study – totalled over 75,000 followers. @tomtommag is the official Instagram account for Tom Tom Magazine, an online and paperback publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting women, queer, and non-binary drummers. The only trade publication made by and for women, the New York-based Tom Tom Magazine is distributed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and Japan. Lastly, @hitlikeagirlcontest is the official Instagram account for the annual women’s drumming competition Hit Like a Girl, featuring women artists and promotional content. The Hit Like a Girl competition began in 2011 through the work of drum industry marketing exec David Levine and is presented in in association with Tom Tom Magazine. Together, these Instagram accounts function as foundational digital infrastructure that networks the women’s online drumming community.

Because there is much to learn from the visual, auditory, and textual content of every Instagram post, our initial thoughts were to develop a critical analysis of discrete posts. We quickly realized however, that in order to learn about audience reception and popular discourse it would be necessary to focus not on content, but instead, on discussion. For this reason, our study examines user comments and the dynamics of the online conversation by, and about, women on Drumming Instagram. Our data set is comprised of comments (n=3,370) from the 100 most recent posts for each of the three accounts (i.e. @femaledrummers = 100, @tomtommag = 100, @hitlikeagirlcontest = 100). To generate the data set, we made use of ExportComments.com: a freemium online tool that converts comments from Instagram accounts into spreadsheets. Once downloaded, we imported the spreadsheets into NVivo (qualitative research software) for further investigation using content analysis: a research method involving the systematic reading, interpretation, and coding of texts to quantify patterns in communication materials.²¹ A staple in media analyses, content analysis is an ideal method for the study of women on Drumming Instagram as its context-sensitivity makes it suitable for analysing large and varied social media datasets. The flexibility of NVivo software allowed us to refine categories as the analysis progressed, eliminating redundancies while aggregating similar coding items to produce more sensitive results.

Our coding protocol was developed through a pilot study conducted in early 2019 using only the @femaledrummers account. During this phase, we developed a series of broad categories according to the function and overall meaning of comment types. These include the following: ‘Compliment/Enthusiasm/Support’ (all of which fall under the broad category of positive feedback); ‘Conversational’ (which could be an expression of gratitude, a question, a reply, a user challenging a comment, or tagging a friend); ‘Unsolicited Comments’ (typically criticism or sexualization); ‘Self-Promotion’ (typically the assertion of one’s own artistic merit or promoting an outside interest); and ‘Other’. Although these categories adequately captured the range of sentiments expressed, there are nevertheless limitations to the approach: Since we limited each comment to a single code, it was at times challenging to decide which category took precedence when comments straddled different categories (i.e. tagging a friend while also complimenting the drummer). Additionally, it was also challenging to decipher the meaning of particular comments. For instance, when do flame and heart emojis signal admiration and when do they signify sexualization? This required careful decision-making, and it illustrates the highly interpretive dimension of content analysis and internet research.

The following chart illustrates each category, its corresponding definition, and examples of the comments that are typical to each.

TYPE OF COMMENT	DEFINITION	EXAMPLE
Compliment/Enthusiasm/Support	User expresses a positive sentiment regarding the drummer’s skill or expresses agreement with the post’s overall message	‘Wow!!! ’ ‘Amazing ’ ‘GET IT ’ ‘TOP ’ ‘YASSSSS ’
Conversational	User comment engages other users
e.g. Gratitude	User thanks another user	‘OMG! TY for the feature! ’ ‘I love this! Thank you so much!’
e.g. Question	User posts a query in response to the post	‘Wow! What’s the name of this drummer?’ ‘What kind of sticks are you using?’ ‘Whoa! How did you do that?’
e.g. Reply	User responds to another user	‘@username you’re welcome ’ ‘@username right?! The best!’
e.g. Challenging commenter	User counters another user’s comment	‘Cheers to the users who actually appreciate her talent instead of commenting on how she looks’ ‘I can’t believe you all are giving her a hard time. She is way better than most of us. Her playing might not be pro, but she played it well. Nicely done!’
e.g. Tag a friend	User tags another user	‘@username check her out’
Unsolicited Comments	User comment is deemed negative or inappropriate
e.g. Criticism	User expresses negative judgement towards another user or post	‘It’s all about attention these days. She thinks she’s the best even though her drumming sucks’ ‘Finally, a drummer who has REAL talent, not just another hot girl’
e.g. Sexualization	User reduces drummer to their physical appearance	‘Wow, so talented AND beautiful!’ ‘Super sexy’
Self-Promotion	User comment serves to promote own interests	‘Awesome! Check out my bio @username if you want to jam sometime’ ‘Hey everyone, check out my new track on YouTube! http://link.com’
Other	Function not listed here (i.e. user expresses a neutral fact or observation) or translation of non-English was unclear	‘The name of this song is Highway to Hell.’ She was last year’s winner.’

Interpreting the Data

Our analysis is based on a sample of 3,370 comments from the 300 posts we examined. In terms of distribution between the three accounts, the majority of these comments (69%, n=2,309) came from @femaledrummers, 25% came from @tomtommag (n=826), and 7% (n=236) came from @hitlikeagirlcontest. While there was user activity on all three accounts, it was clear that @femaledrummers attracted the greatest amount of participation, largely due to the size of its following.

Overwhelmingly, the discussion that takes place within all three accounts expresses a sentiment that is positive, supportive, and encouraging. In fact, nearly 60% (n= 2,004, 59%) of all comments fell into the category ‘Compliment/Enthusiasm/Support’. Participants regularly complimented the abilities of featured performers and expressed support for women drummers and the musical initiatives with which they are associated (including bands, events, competitions, etc.). In terms of the individual accounts, this sentiment appeared most frequently on @hitlikeagirlcontest (n=152, 65%), which we paradoxically attribute to the competitive dimension of the initiative. Although it is ultimately a competition that might otherwise produce antagonistic sentiments, @hitlikeagirlcontest is foremost an organization designed to encourage participation among women, girl, and gender minority drummers. Its posts consist not only of competition winners who almost always earn public congratulations, but also of general competitors, finalists, and advertising and promotion for the event, all of which also generates public interest and support. The prevalence of such enthusiastic and supportive forms of dialogue, not only on @hitlikeagirlcontest but across all three accounts, are typical markers of feminist online communities, where maintaining a positive and encouraging atmosphere is a part of the social infrastructure and genre.

It is also worth mentioning some of the secondary but no less important types of communication operating in the online community of women drummers. Nearly a third of comments (32%, n=1,085) were conversational or interactive in tone. For instance, tagging a friend comprised 15% of all posts (n=516), which was done to share content with others who may have particular interest in a given post while also initiating further commentary and discussion. 10% of all comments were replies to other users in the context of dialogue (n=334), 5% expressed gratitude (n=160), and 2% posed a question (n=74). All of this activity is an important part of community dialogue, where users aim to interact with artists, acquire new techniques, or thank others for their posts. These types of comments most commonly appeared on @tomtommag (40%, n=330), where user dialogue was more prominent than the expression of enthusiasm and support for female participation we saw on other pages. We read the nature of @tomtommag’s dialogue as an expression of a community with aims extending beyond visibility, instead gravitating around questions of artistry and curiosity amongst distinct musical cultures.

In the context of community dialogue and conversation, gratitude was particularly apparent and operated as a type of community currency. For instance, drummers whose original content was reposted on any one of the three accounts regularly thanked account administrators for their support and recognition. Similarly, amateur drummers often took the time to personally acknowledge the compliments of other users through their own expression of gratitude. Gratitude appeared in 5% of comments (n=160), typically in the form of drummers thanking account moderators for posting or reposting their content. This was most common on @hitlikeagirlcontest (11%, n=27), where users regularly thanked page moderators for sharing their content or organizing the competition itself. This type of activity indicates the highly supportive and reciprocal nature of this online community.

Our data shows, however, that no matter how supportive, the public and visible nature of these online communities does not insulate them from criticism. Although only a minority of comments (4%, n=149) were negative and fell into the ‘unsolicited’ category, they nevertheless warrant discussion. Such comments tended to be either rude, critical, or sexualizing, and were often misogynistic in tone. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these comments appeared on @femaledrummers posts (6%, n=143), which is perhaps expected in light of the visibility and popularity of this particular account. Some of these negative comments came off as slightly patronizing when they contained terms like ‘dear’ or ‘sweetie’, but they more commonly appeared in criticisms of a performers’ technique or appearance (4%, n=95), or even in sexually-objectifying language (1%, n=34). Criticism sometimes occurred as a form of disruption, usually interrupting a stream of praise (i.e. ‘she sucks!’). But it also occurred in comments where users criticized women drummers generally as a way to compliment a woman drummer specifically (i.e. ‘You should post talented drummers like this more often instead of ones that just look good on camera’). We also found that some of the most vitriolic comments appeared not when drummers posted videos of themselves playing, but when they made political statements about gender and drumming. In user responses to one such video, some users replied that the video was shitty’, that the drummer needed to ‘shut the f*** up’, and repudiated identity politics altogether, asserting that gender had little to do with music. Although the comments in our sample were for the most part positive, we wondered how that might change if drummers in this space had made more politically charged – and therefore controversial – statements.

What it may have also done, however, was increase the frequency by which users challenged those who left critical comments on performers’ videos. In our sample, we found seven instances where users defended performers against unfair critiques, suggesting that community members will enforce informal norms around keeping Drumming Instagram a positive and supportive space for women. On one post we examined where various commenters made inappropriate comments about the drummer’s appearance and performance style, we saw a number of users come to the performer’s defence. One user in particular accused those leaving harsh comments of being envious of her talent and feeling unfulfilled in their personal lives. They reiterated their support for women drummers and encouraged critics to have a more positive outlook. Remarks such as these demonstrated both the strength and the resilience of the community, and the fact that its members feel strongly committed to defending fellow performers from the unfair critique and occasional vitriol that accompanies women daring to be seen and heard on Drumming Instagram.

The Ambivalence of Networked Performance

That user responses on @femaledrummers, @tomtommag, and @hitlikeagirlcontest were overwhelmingly positive was somewhat unexpected in light of the negative discourses that surround discussion of online culture and commenting – particularly when it comes to gender and equity-related issues in historically male-dominated spaces. We attribute this to the fact that the relatively niche and emergent nature of this online community means that many members and visitors are already personally invested in and supportive of women and gender minority drummers. This suggests that, as questions of identity-based online participation goes, context certainly matters. For example, the supportive tone of comments may have differed on more general Drumming Instagram accounts (i.e. @drumeo, @modern_drummer, or @drumlads), just as they would likely differ on accounts supporting more mainstream feminist efforts (i.e. those that promote visibility of women in STEM or campaigns to promote a wider representation of women’s bodies in media).

We also found that women’s Drumming Instagram provided more opportunities for users to interact with one another. Far from serving as a site where users passively consumed content, users regularly commented and replied to each other. Although the majority of this interactive process involved users tagging one another as a means of sharing content, it was also common to ask questions and respond to one another’s comments. This again demonstrated the communitarian nature of this space as well as its users’ commitments. The majority of the users in this space shared a common goal of supporting the increased visibility of women and gender minority drummers, with networked information technologies serving as integral communal infrastructure.

Given the overwhelming positivity of this space, it was unsurprising that hostile and misogynist commentary was uncommon. Whether due to careful moderation by the page owners or the relatively quiet feminism of the content, the popular misogyny evident in so much of online discourse about gender was relatively absent. We wondered how this might have differed had the content been more political or the pages more mainstream. Indeed, content and audience size play an important role in shaping reception. For example, we observed that @tomtommag tended to post more explicitly political content than @femaledrummers (for instance, by posting a photo in support of Dr Christine Blasey Ford during the Kavanaugh hearing), with its smaller audience perhaps insulating it from the backlash one might typically expect. @femaledrummers, on the other hand, had a much wider userbase and online presence that inadvertently courted backlash the few times it posted explicitly political content. Thus, the feminism of women’s Drumming Instagram is a complex and uneven phenomenon that is still evolving.

The nature of this uneven, emergent form of feminism on Drumming Instagram makes it difficult to say whether or not it is a space where an emancipatory feminist politics can emerge. Insofar as women’s Drumming Instagram promotes positive images of women and gender minority drummers that are often side-lined in popular and niche music scenes, it succeeds at making them visible. This is a feminist politics of visibility that is not about individual empowerment nor about unfettered consumption but is about recuperating and celebrating marginalized people’s contribution to music. This visibility is not restricted to white and normatively gendered bodies (though user comments indicate which bodies are seen as worthy of attention and engagement) but is inclusive of a range of different identities. In other words, women’s Drumming Instagram does not exactly resemble the feminist online efforts that tend to be analysed in the scholarly literature.

However, the extent to which women’s Drumming Instagram is emancipatory is complicated because the underlying political struggle that gives life to this community remains relatively muted. Images of women and gender minority performers exist in this space, and they are rewarded with compliments and occasional feminist solidarity. Yet the few times where performers explicitly address the politics of gender and drumming renders them vulnerable to the online vitriol one would come to expect in other online spaces. We would answer our own question with another: although women and gender minority performers may be visible on Instagram, are their demands as feminists in fact being heard?

Conclusion

This study explored the relationship between online visibility, social norms, and political change in the emergent online community of women on Drumming Instagram. What we found, among other things, was that context matters: in online spaces dedicated to promoting women drummers, users are generally supportive because they are explicitly seeking out images that are otherwise side-lined in the mainstream world of drumming. We also found that women’s Drumming Instagram is not so different than other online communities insofar as it invites both detractors and defenders. The openness of online communities, regardless of type, means that users with little personal investment will occasionally leave disruptive or hostile comments that will not go unchecked.²² And although a minority of comments were overly critical or even sexualizing, committed users regularly challenged them while enforcing the shared values of the space (i.e. encouraging and supporting women drummers of all abilities).

Ultimately however, what emerged from this exploration was that women’s Drumming Instagram affords women drummers a specific type of networked visibility that both supports and limits the possibilities for change. Although the increased visibility of women drummers in historically male-dominated spaces is a welcome departure from the past, we wonder about the emancipatory potential of a politics that begins and ends with visibility alone. The drummers on this page received acclaim when their content was about drumming, but courted backlash when the content was explicitly about gender. This may discourage drummers from speaking up on political issues, thus muting the political possibilities of their visibility. In short, Instagram is a space where women drummers are seen, but it remains unclear whether or not we, the broader drumming community, are willing to truly listen.

Introduction

Hey Drums (2016-present) is a blog documenting the work and experiences of Australian female and gender diverse drummers.¹ The site also features percussionists but is largely focused on promoting a diverse intersection of players of an instrument widely and predominantly accepted as the territory of cis gendered men: the drum kit.² Just as ‘drummers have largely been neglected in scholarly literature on music and education’,³ non-male drummers are routinely underrepresented in drum kit culture, to the point where these artists are required to write their own histories and document their own contributions. Much literature and media surrounding the instrument is not representative of the diversity of drummers out there, which Hey Drums (amongst other publications and movements) seeks to address.

At the time of writing, interviews with more than 145 drummers from across the Australian continent have been published on the site and promoted on Hey Drums social media platforms and there is a dedicated Spotify playlist featuring bands with female and gender non-conforming (GNC) drummers. The project has grown into an online and real-life community of drummers, regular articles in a nationwide drumming magazine, live performance, and teaching events, as well as academic outcomes. This chapter will document the genesis, goals, and evolution of Hey Drums and affiliated projects, highlighting some of the individual artists and the broad range of areas in which they work.

A Woman’s Work

As early as 2001, I wanted to do something to counter the incessant feedback I had received throughout my teens which continued into my twenties, that ‘girls don’t play drums’, with some kind of project listing and profiling all the Australian non male drummers I could find.

I began the Hey Drums blog in 2016 as an acknowledgement of the people I already knew, and to learn about others. It started with some personal emails and a public call on Facebook, which resulted in more than twenty candidates within an hour. There has been a steady stream of willing and eager interviewees ever since, demonstrating the great need and enthusiasm for this project. I find interview participants mostly by word of mouth. Some are self-nominated. Some are suggested by bandmates or friends. Some are found at gigs and on social media. The need for the project is affirmed almost every time I contact a new drummer and explain what the project is (often now they have heard of the project), and receive many replies affirming I haven’t been alone in feeling isolated as a non-male drummer. Melbourne based session drummer Julia Watt, for example, says that:

The birth of the blog and beginning to pen feature articles for Drumscene magazine happened almost simultaneously in mid-2016.⁵ I was starting to collect all this information and saw the possibility of doing something more than simply presenting it on the Hey Drums blog. A chance discovery of the female-focused drumming magazine Tom Tom in a music store in New Orleans in 2015 had me reflecting on Australia’s own drumming magazine, Drumscene and its lack of representation of female and gender diverse drummers.⁶ It was evident that a wider audience could be reached, at the same time as challenging the typical male drummer stereotype very much reinforced by previous issues of Drumscene.

A few email exchanges later with editor and founder of the quarterly magazine, Frank Corniola, and I was to become a regular writer for the print publication, contributing articles about all aspects of life as a drummer that just happened to feature non-male artists. Frank was aware of the lack of representation in the magazine and was open to doing something about it together.

The articles do not mention gender unless it is something that the interviewees specifically bring up. They instead focus (just as in all the other articles in the magazine) on different elements of drumming and drumming related experiences. I have been careful to avoid sensationalising the people in the articles.

You Can’t Be What You Can’t See

The desired outcome of this work is the normalisation of seeing and hearing women and gender diverse folks behind the drum kit: to simultaneously increase representation and raise awareness that these drummers exist. It is just as important for these drummers to see themselves represented as it is for younger aspiring drummers to see themselves represented in print.⁷

Since 2016, I have penned more than fifteen articles for Drumscene, including profiles of dozens of Australian drummers both here and overseas – articles on touring, session playing, yoga for drummers, inclusive music education programs for young people, practice hacks, promoting yourself as a drummer on social media, and interviews with international superstars Terri Lyne Carrington, Cindy Blackman Santana, and Vera Figueiredo.

Each artist featured on the Hey Drums blog answers the same set of questions.⁸ There is no common theme amongst the answers given, except perhaps in the final question: ‘What advice would you give your younger drumming self?’ There is a strong sense of solidarity amongst the interviewees and their less experienced selves; a combination of many variations on ‘don’t be so hard on yourself’ and ‘don’t let annoying old man drummers try and intimidate you with useless facts about what kind of cymbals you should be using’ ^[9].

There are three main goals of Hey Drums:

1. 1. The documentation of Australian drummers;

2. 2. The inclusion across all iterations of the project of trans and GNC people;

3. 3. The promotion of all the interviewed drummers the same way regardless of level of experience, ‘fame’, ‘chops’, or genre.

Conclusion

Strangers now contact me when they are looking for a drummer, percussionist, or teacher. Artists and audience are invested in diversity and there is a growing movement in Australia of acknowledging privilege when employing musicians and looking around for who is not currently being represented. People are realising the importance and relevance of supporting, acknowledging the work being done by female and GNC people in a traditionally male dominated area. Alex Roper, a Melbourne-based freelancer and one of the first interviewees for Hey Drums, explains the importance of the blog:

The project offers value to the music community and music audiences in Australia via the blog, private and public social media groups and platforms. It has great value as a resource and a work of advocacy. What is unique about Hey Drums is that it assumes first and foremost that everyone who is interviewed, who has a lived experience of being a gigging drummer, deserves to be there. GNC, non-binary, and non-male analyses are critical for truly representative future studies of the drum kit, and there is a great opportunity to include a diverse range of voices from a relatively early stage in the burgeoning field of drum kit related academia.

Historically, women drummers have been separated out in literature – female artists separated out into articles such as ‘the best female ... of the 90s’ or ‘5 female drummers you should know’ and GNC artists are all but written out of history. Tom Tom Magazine, Angela Smith’s History of Women Drummers and Layne Redmond’s When the Drummers Where Women fill a substantial gap in the literature. Hey Drums is attempting to do the same and, though unfortunate that this is still at all necessary, will continue to do so until sensationalised articles about female drummers claim ‘girls can do it all’, ‘breaking the mold’, ‘marching to their own beat’, are no longer tolerated or relevant – until ‘alternate histories’ of drumming no longer need to be written.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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. 1. Doing something I know I can do, a place and time where I feel competent, confident, empowered and able to succeed;

2. 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.