A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit: Magical Nexus 9781108993180, 9781108995023, 1108993184

Table of contents :
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit: Magical Nexus
Contents
1 Introduction
Background
Why Write a Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit?
Method
Meaning, Mattering and Drum Kit
Magical Nexus
Correspondences: Accessing the Magical Nexus
Overview of the Element
2 Materials
Body
Instrument
Environment
Lockdown Recordings
Recording Mud Drums
3 Construction
Improvisation and Groove
Creativity and Composition
Dynamics and Rock Drumming
Rehearsal Realism
Construction in Concert
4 Values/Culture
Mutual Musical and Extra-Musical Values
Black Belt Jesus and Black Light Bastards
Cultural Authenticity
5 Expression
Feeling Right, Feeling Me
Purpose and Eudaimonia
Feeling and Listening
Joy
6 In Closing (Button)
Drumming, Music and Correspondence
How to get to the Magical Nexus
Correspondence and the Magical Nexus
References
Acknowledgements

Citation preview

A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit Magical Nexus

Gareth Dylan Smith https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cover image: simoncarter / Getty Images

Series Editor Simon ZagorskiThomas London College of Music, University of West London

Twenty-First Century Music Practice A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit

About the Series This series focuses on what Christopher Small termed Musicking – the process of making and sharing music – and serves scholars and students of ethnomusicology, performance studies, and practice pedagogy / practice-led-research. The series welcomes research about any musical tradition or style, from hip-hop to historically informed performance to indigenous music.

Smith

The author is a drummer with experience in a variety of musical genres and contexts, with emphasis on rock and related styles. This auto ethnographic element presents the author’s philosophy of playing drum kit. The text explains how playing drum kit matters to this musician and may resonate with others to whom making music matters in similar ways. The element contains audio files of music in which the author plays drum kit in the ensemble settings described. There are photos of the author’s drums and of him drumming. Based on June BoyceTillman’s non-religious model of holistic spirituality and Tim Ingold’s notion of correspondences, the author describes how playing drum kit enables him to experience transcendence – the magical nexus at which Materials, Construction, Values/ Culture and Expression meet. Each of these domains, and the magic derived from their combination, is illustrated through examples of the author’s live and recorded musical collaborations.

ISSN 2633-4585 (online) ISSN 2633-4577 (print)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice edited by

Simon Zagorski-Thomas London College of Music, University of West London

A PHILOSOPHY OF PLAYING DRUM KIT Magical Nexus

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Gareth Dylan Smith Boston University

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108995023 DOI: 10.1017/9781108993180 © Gareth Dylan Smith 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2022

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-99502-3 Paperback ISSN 2633-4585 (online) ISSN 2633-4577 (print) Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit Magical Nexus Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice DOI: 10.1017/9781108993180 First published online: September 2022

Gareth Dylan Smith Boston University Author for correspondence: Gareth Dylan Smith, [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Abstract: The author is a drummer with experience in a variety of musical genres and contexts, with emphasis on rock and related styles. This autoethnographic Element presents the author’s philosophy of playing drum kit. The text explains how playing drum kit matters to this musician and may resonate with others to whom making music matters in similar ways. The Element contains audio files of music in which the author plays drum kit in the ensemble settings described. There are photos of the author’s drums and of him drumming. Based on June Boyce-Tillman’s non-religious model of holistic Spirituality and Tim Ingold’s notion of correspondences, the author describes how playing drum kit enables him to experience transcendence – the magical nexus at which Materials, Construction, Values/Culture and Expression meet. Each of these domains, and the magic derived from their combination, is illustrated through examples of the author’s live and recorded musical collaborations. This Element also has a video abstract: www.cambridge.org/ TwentyFirst_Century_Music_Practice_Smith_abstract Keywords: Gareth Dylan Smith, drum kit, philosophy, music, magic © Gareth Dylan Smith 2022 ISBNs: 9781108995023 (PB), 9781108993180 (OC) ISSNs: 2633-4585 (online), 2633-4577 (print)

Contents

1 Introduction 2 Materials

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3 Construction

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4 Values/Culture

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5 Expression

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6 In Closing (Button)

56

References

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1 Introduction

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Background I started playing drum kit around thirty-three years ago when my maternal grandmother gave me drums for my twelfth birthday. About six months later I formed a rock band, Purple Freuds, with two school friends, and around the same time I joined another band, the Dooberie Hounds, with some other friends. After learning a few covers, we mostly wrote our own material; the other band members would come with riffs, chord sequences or a fully formed song with melody and lyrics, and I would negotiate a drum part that the song’s originator felt suited the material. We practised songs till they were as good as we could get them and performed occasionally in local shows. This modus operandi has guided my musicmaking to this day; playing in bands with friends and peers centres and grounds me. In the words of jazz musician Joe Gardner in the movie, Soul, ‘it’s my reason for living’ (Docter, 2020). For thirty years, I played with many bands that had names like Fizzy Wig, South Lands, Bodega, Mass Defect, 3rd Day Rising, Peyote, Three’s Company, Sanction, Neck, DSK, Leo’s Garden, Eruptörs and the Hummingbirds. I drummed with singer-songwriters Ally Brown, Daniel Spiller and Gillian Glover. We rehearsed and performed together as frequently as we could, and with all these bands the main aim was the same. We had almost no business savoir faire and as little business interest. For the resources we poured into making music, the reward was making that music together as best we could. In this we flourished and thrived (Smith, 2017). Writing this Element, I felt variously pretentious, self-indulgent and like I was surely wasting my own and others’ time. Reminded by my own response to others’ philosophical writing, though, I also felt motivated by the possibility that any insights I shared might prove useful, provocative, challenging or comforting in some way to others. I write quite a lot, primarily out of a compulsion to try to make sense of my world. My compulsion to write is matched or exceeded by my compulsion to play drum kit. Perhaps in a subsequent piece of writing, I will explore my compulsion to reflect and to write and to try to understand things – however contingently and fleetingly and incompletely that understanding might always be. This Element, though, explores my louder compulsion, the one that takes up so much physical and sonic space in my life. I am writing this Element because I have met at least scores, probably hundreds of other people for whom making music is as important as it is to me – it is as vital to us as breathing, and far more laden with meaning. Unable to speak for others, I wanted to set down on paper the ways in which drumming matters to me, and how it is that it matters in those ways.

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I hope my attempt to articulate the compulsion to musicking might resonate with other musicians and those with whom our lives intersect. Writing and drumming provide a sort of yin and yang for my mind, body, spirit and schedule. Drumming provides the immersive, explosive, physical, intensely present moments to counter the abstract, slow, careful work of meticulously crafting and re-crafting prose. I am grateful to be able to accommodate both of these in my life, for I know when I have had too much of one then the writing or drumming experience becomes numb and uninspired; I need to invest in the other to rebalance and refill the ways in which I make meaning. It hardly seems necessary to note that drumming and writing are far from the only ways in which I make meaning; but they loom large in my life, and as a scholar of music and music learning, I felt compelled to produce this manuscript. I might just as well have played drums about writing, but probably no one would have known that was what I was doing. Numerous people have been claimed as originators of the adage, ‘writing about music makes as much sense as dancing about architecture’. While I wholeheartedly disagree with the underlying sentiment about the pointlessness of writing about music, with the comparison, I concur; moreover, were I a more confident dancer, I might very well dance about architecture, or about anything else to which I wished to respond. I have drummed about (or because of, in response to and in order to help me process) all manner of experiences and encounters. Processing experiences through artistic expression – and, equally, artistic impression (Matsunobu, 2007) – are important ways in which musicians make sense of our world. Hand in glove with this understanding is that writing and reading about artistic practices are essential to [me, anyway] developing fully as an artist, a scholar, a musician, a writer, a teacher and a human. This Element is not intended as a justification for me or anyone else playing drum kit. For one thing, I don’t think playing drum kit needs justification, but I am also not interested in using this space to convince anyone that my life choices are more or less morally acceptable. Basically, playing drum kit is really important to me, and in this Element I attempt to explain the ‘how’ of that importance. I touch a little on why too, but I am woefully underqualified for that job. According to a life coach I chatted with a handful of times, I am trying to please my father (I guess he’d been reading Jung); internet browsing tells me I probably have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (based primarily on anecdotal evidence, this is not uncommon among drummers); I’ve always found it pretty easy and unendingly rewarding to play drum kit, and I’m good at it (a lot of people – including my dad – have told me this, so it must be at least a bit true). But that is perhaps the extent of the neuro-psycho-socio-cultural reasoning I will undertake for explaining why I do what I do. I cannot undo the

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fact that drumming is important to me, so instead I attempt herein to explain the ways in which playing drum kit matters to me.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Why Write a Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit? I did not set out to write a philosophical tract. I have always been interested in philosophy but felt it was the business of others to write it – those with greater understanding of the inner workings of the universe, who have a stronger grasp of the questions they are asking and who feel far more assured of the value of their ideas than I do my own. I felt, and I still feel, rather unworthy of authoring a philosophical treatise! That being said, I have known for a while that I wanted to write this Element, which contains the current culmination of my understanding of its topic. David Elliott and Marissa Silverman – two of the pre-eminent thinkers on music and music education – describe philosophy in the following way: ‘Philosophy is an active endeavor, a long-standing and continuing social practice that people carry out individually and with others through careful analyses of commonsense assumptions and the construction of fine-tuned, logical argumentation . . . [‘Argument’ here means] a set of logically connected statements that presents a person’s reasons and evidence for his or her claims or beliefs’ (2015: 26–7). In a similar vein, although writing for a more general readership than Elliott and Silverman, David L Norton and Mary F Kille note that philosophy ‘functions to enlarge our lives and transcend our limitations. It enriches our experience by sounding its depths and widening its horizons. It awakens us to possibilities within ourselves which . . . have gone unrecognized. In so doing it affords us opportunities of freedom and choice in the interest of meaningful living’ (Norton & Kille, 1971: 1). From these assertions, among others, I realised I have been engaging in philosophical praxis and consequently titled this Element ‘A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit’. It is worth quoting Elliott and Silverman further, since they explain a good deal of what this Element does and why I found it necessary to write it. Elliott and Silverman (2015: 27) note that ‘philosophy is the process of thinking carefully about our thoughts, mindsets, and actions’; it is doing precisely these things in regard to playing drum kit that led me to compose this text. Elliott and Silverman go on to say that ‘doing so allows us to develop an understanding of others and ourselves and reasoned principles of personal and social conduct . . .. It helps us understand more fully our own and others’ ideas and actions’. I could not have more precisely articulated the effect that I hope

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this Element might have on readers; for me there is no higher goal for my writing than that it could help people to understand one another better and more fully. Lastly, Elliott and Silverman note that ‘doing philosophy contributes to a wider sense of personal and professional meaning and opens our eyes to wider possibilities of human experience, including our experiences as musicians, teachers, and ethical human beings’. Through better understanding myself as a drummer, I hope to be more patient, compassionate and kind in my life and work. Both affirming and assuaging my feelings of pretension and selfindulgence, Norton and Kille (1971: 1) tell us that ‘good philosophy begins in scrupulous attention to one’s own experience’. A good portion of this Element is devoted to little else, although I hope this introspection serves its intended purpose of increasing comprehension of the human condition from the perspective of a drummer trying better to understand both myself and my fellow humans. North and Kille identify philosophising as both ‘the most human of activities and the most necessary’ (1971: 1). I (along, presumably, with Maslow (1954), for example) am not sure I would characterise philosophy or philosophising as pre-eminent among human activities, but I agree it is a worthwhile endeavour. I might, however, put making music atop that pre-eminence pedestal. I wrote this Element in summer and winter of 2021, during the waning days of the Covid-19 pandemic, at least in the USA where I was living and writing, where vaccine production and distribution accelerated with remarkable speed in the first half of the year. Earlier in the pandemic, musicians and artists in my home country of the United Kingdom were beset with government guidance to retrain – as teachers, accountants and computer scientists. While there may well be some good sense in suggesting that musicians diversify their income streams, the rhetoric was offensive, inhumane and inhuman in its focus on arts as functional in an entirely economic rationale. I know many dozens of musicians personally, and have met several hundred more, and I can say with complete certainty that none of us makes music solely for monetary gain. Moreover, with the exception of a minute handful of individuals for whom music performance provides all their income, music is one of the most unreliable ways to make a living. And while the arts can and do generate revenue, money is not the reason artists do art. Art making persists in every culture and society worldwide. Music helps us to make sense of who we are, collectively and individually. It is necessary for the human experience and helps us to thrive. I would prefer that in moments of social crisis like a global pandemic, governments should encourage more and more making of art, by as many people as possible. Musicking should not be a contest, despite pressures of the commercial music marketplace

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and relentless media efforts to present musicians as fiercely competing in some kind of Hunger Games for money and fame. For musicians, the fundamental reward for making music is that we get to make music. This is not to deny that musicians absolutely should be remunerated for our work; we are fortunate that our work is also deeply rooted in our individual and shared humanity.

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Meaning, Mattering and Drum Kit According to Harry G Frankfurt (1998), ‘the importance of reflexivity to those in whose lives it occurs is readily apparent. A creature’s sensitivity to its own condition . . . is essential for purposeful behavior’ (162). I concur. Playing drum kit has long held an important place in my life. It has determined much about my schedule, the type of car I drive and the size of home I live in. As an educator who has taught musicians for twenty-five years and musician-teachers for more than a decade, reflexivity about playing drum kit, and about what it means to be a particular type of musician, has felt increasingly like a moral imperative. I want my students to know that I think deeply and carefully about how music makes sense in my life, to encourage them to do similarly for their own lives. As Elliott and Silverman (2015) tell us, this perpetual work of reflection does not guarantee the best answers, but it is necessary nonetheless to work mindfully and consciously through what it means to be who we are. For about as long as I have been a drummer, and all the more in my adult life through numerous moves from one apartment or house to another, between cities and 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 ways in which why I find drumming, in the various forms in which I do it, so very compelling. I have found fulfilment through every aspect of being a drummer. Not playing drums or not having the opportunity to play drums is unimaginable to me. While such a claim might seem outrageous to some, to 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’ (Bruford, 2009: 251). I know many musicians to whom making music is so vital that to not make music in particular ways would amount to not being themselves. I believe it is important that we be ourselves, with the caveat that this should do no harm to others. Writing that, I understand that my music making almost certainly causes harm to many people. Being a privileged inhabitant of the exploitative Global North, I do not see most of the harm that my musicking does. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that the plastic drumheads I play, the bronze cymbals I strike, the hickory drumsticks I wield, the electricity needed to

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make the rock music that I love and the petrol that powers the car in which I drive myself to rehearsals and gigs are all made from materials drawn unsustainably from deep within the Earth that is our fragile home. I do not fully understand the ways in which I need to be a better steward of our planet’s resources, and this remains a work in progress for me. Frankfurt (1998) acknowledges the inherent complexity in what a person can be compelled to do, noting, ‘there may be a conflict between how someone wants to be motivated and the desire by which he [sic] is in fact most powerfully moved’ (164). This tension is tangible in my own life in the aforementioned ways, and I feel similar perpetual challenges in my life as a father, husband, neighbour, professor, teacher and community member. I frequently find myself discussing with individual students or colleagues an existential crisis they feel in regard to conflicting identities and roles. This often begins when young adults take on a job in addition to being a musician; when will they find time to practise? If they take on work in another domain, will they lose all their chops, credentials and respect as a musician? If they keep putting time into practice as a performer, will that negatively impact their work as, for instance, an educator? For doctoral students and fellow professors, the tension is compounded, now that they also have to spend countless hours reading, writing, editing and formatting dense academic prose. Adults accrue responsibilities – for example, as lovers, spouses, friends, community activists, parents, homeowners and more. How on earth can you be productive and effective in one domain without crashing and burning in all the others? Can you even keep all of the plates spinning? Can a person remain authentic to themself at all?! I think balance is possible, although maybe it feels like perpetual imbalance. In a given day, I cannot devote the time I would wish to my drumming, writing, teaching, family, fitness, home, friends, diet, mental health and whatever else needs doing. Over a week, though, one can address more, and over a semester or a year the balance becomes still more even. Over a longer timeline, it is possible to see how different priorities ebb and flow. I find time to attend conferences, write papers, go on hikes and vacations with family, attend my daughter’s softball games and theatre performances, make lunches, walk to and from the school bus, commute to work, keep up with scholarship in my field, stay in touch with friends, practise karate and even sometimes clean the interior of my car. Balance is in the constant motion, tangible although perpetually just out of reach. For me, this is philosophical praxis – acting and reflecting in symbiosis, carving out a rhythm, a groove. The thing that has stayed with me the longest and strongest – across countries, cities, homes, relationships, jobs, careers, institutions, competing pressures and stress – is playing drum kit. It is a massive part of what makes me, me. I drum, therefore I am.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

In his compelling essay, ‘The importance of what we care about’, Frankfurt (1998: 81) determines that people ‘need to understand what is important or, rather, what is important to us’ (emphasis in original). That about which one cares is not objectively more or less important than ethical or moral obligations, although depending on the degree to which one cares about a given thing, it may concede to, or take priority over, other such considerations. Frankfurt (1998) calls the compulsion to a particular course of action (such as a lifelong commitment to playing drum kit) ‘volitional necessity’ (87) and describes how ‘a person may be in some sense liberated though acceding to a power which is not subject to his immediate voluntary control’ (89); that is to say, one does not get to choose that about which one cares. He also points to something of a paradox here, whereby [I as a drummer] might feel at once both in thrall to and empowered by the volitional necessity to play drum kit. To an extent, we may choose how we respond to our passions and compulsions, but we must acknowledge that ‘we are creatures to whom things matter’ (80); to me, playing drum kit matters. Frankfurt locates a person’s volitional necessity both internally and externally – individually and socially – which Ed Sarath accounts for in terms of a musician’s self-identity, explaining that this is necessarily located in a particular musical–cultural context, that is, the particular musical practices about which we care. In order for musicians to attain self-identity, they must identify that musical culture that most strongly resonates on the soul level, or however one might describe music to which one connects deeply on emotional and spiritual levels. Because the primordial, archetypal impulses that are, from a transcultural vantage point, important to the soul connection are embedded in the primary musical culture, the significance of this kind of selfcultural grounding cannot be overstated. (Sarath, 2018: 32)

The musical culture with which I identify most strongly is, broadly, rock music, and more broadly still, anything that involves me playing a drum kit to provide a steady groove in collaboration with others. ‘My’ music is the largely AngloAmerican rock- and jazz-influenced fusion music that grew out of jazz and blues in the US commercial music boom of the early to mid-twentieth century. With rock at the centre, I branch with varying degrees of comfort into jazz, hip-hop, RnB, pop and related styles and genres. As Sarath (2018) is also keen to emphasise, the specific genres are less important than the ethos that informs the music I make. I like music that requires me to play repeated deep rhythmic grooves in a small ensemble with others. That music is usually amplified and in various ways electronic (I usually play mostly acoustic drums, which are amplified depending on the size of performance venue, with instruments and

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voices that are amplified, since in rock styles the drums tend to be played energetically and loudly; more on this later). This music requires creative input from me, in originating or selecting rhythms for a given song, musical piece or moment and in improvisation throughout iterations of playing, performing and recording that music. Succumbing to/choosing/living the volitional necessity to play drum kit is incredibly fulfilling. But the fulfilling life is rarely one of smooth sailing. As Susan Wolf points out:

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Someone whose life is fulfilling has no guarantee of being happy in the conventional sense . . .. Many of the things that grip or engage us make us vulnerable to pain, disappointment, and stress. [Furthermore,] spending one’s time, energy, money, and so on, on the projects that fulfill you necessarily reduces the resources you have for engaging in activities that are ‘merely’ fun. (Wolf, 2009: 14)

I enjoy playing drum kit alone, and I especially like doing it in collaboration with others. I love the sound of a drum kit, and I cherish how drumming allows and requires me to be fully present, in ways that very little else does, and rewards me endlessly for my attention. I love the physicality of playing. I love to create a groove with others. I love the dynamics – the drum kit can whisper and roar, with dynamic extremes so much greater than many other instruments. Behind the drum kit is one of the very few domains where I feel secure in who I am. It is of course always a work in progress, but there I feel completeness, competence, rightness, wellness and freedom. It is comparable to how I feel in the best moments with my immediate family, but those relationships are so much more complicated. My wife and I have a mortgage and car loans to pay off, changing priorities, conflicting schedules and complex emotions to manage. I feel love and peace with my daughter, along with excitement, terror and anxiety for her future well-being and thriving. At the drum kit, everything is simple and straightforward, or at least it can be worked out. There, I take the anticipated and the unexpected in my stride. I can steer the music, respond to the music, listen to the music and be the music. My life would be far easier were I to ditch playing drum kit, and the many frustrations it causes me and my family would be gone, but so would the incredible highs, the potential, the possibilities and the joy! The stakes are too personal and the commitment too deep for me to seriously consider letting it go, as Frankfurt points out, observing, ‘a person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it . . .. Insofar as the person’s life is in whole or in part devoted to anything . . . it is devoted to this’ (1998: 83). As I explore elsewhere in this

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Element, this purposeful life pursuit has been called ‘eudaimonia’, and adherence to this commitment, ‘eudaimonism’. Maslow (1967) is cited by Norton and Kille (1971: 118) when they note that this individualistic version of ‘eudaimonism . . . admonishes us to keep our desires constant with what we are’ – aligning one’s actions with authenticity to the self. Norton describes eudaimonic individuals as ‘quietly and decisively living their lives according to their own inner imperative[s]’ (1976: xiii). Similarly, Waterman describes such people as ‘liv[ing] in accordance with the daimon or “true self”’ (1992: 58), roughly following what Frankl terms a person’s ‘will to meaning’; Frankl indeed urges that, where possible, one has a responsibility to live according to their true purpose ([1959] 1997: 121). A purposeful, eudaimonic approach to life has been contrasted with a shallower, hedonic perspective (Ryan et al., 2008). For Wolf, however, such a ‘Fulfillment View’ is itself ‘a form of hedonism’ (2010: 15), since the eudaimonic individualist seeks constant satiation of their needs. Wolf’s view contrasts with Frankfurt’s perspective, where the volitional necessity [to play drum kit] is not fully under the drummer’s control. I appreciate Wolf’s perspective and feel that I should accept responsibility for my choices, but my own conscience rests easier with the Frankfurtian view that, as much as I might choose playing drum kit, playing drum kit keeps on choosing me.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993180 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Method This Element comprises an autoethnographic, lived aesthetic enquiry that focuses on my praxis as a drummer, presenting a somewhat ‘complex mediation and reconstruction of experience’ (Pinar et al., 1995: 567). As Chang (2008) articulates, ‘the data collection field for autoethnography is the researcher’s own life’ (89). Reed-Danahay (1997) affirms autoethnography as ‘a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context . . . both a method and a text’ (9). Drawing on Jones and colleagues (2013), Denzin elaborates, stating that ‘Autoethnography is the use of personal experience and personal writing to (1) purposefully comment on/critique cultural practices; (2) make contributions to existing research; (3) embrace vulnerability with purpose; and (4) create a reciprocal relationship with audiences in order to compel a response’ (Denzin, 2014: 20). While this Element meets these criteria to differing degrees, I (1) comment herein on the cultural practice of playing drums to make music in various contexts; (2) contribute to existing research by developing my own body of work about drumming praxis, to drum kit scholarship more broadly and to the burgeoning of area scholarship in making and learning popular music

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(Green, 2002; Smith et al., 2017; Moir et al., 2019); (3) embrace vulnerability through an honest and sincere account of personally meaningful musicking in an effort to understand that more fully and (4) welcome any responses at all from reader-interlocutors/correspondents. As someone who continues to write, play drum kit, teach, read and undertake research all as vital components of who I am personally and professionally, I find it essential to work to understand how these things all mesh, fold and cohabit. A life in music is well suited to the openly subjective ‘autoethnographic paradigm, [wherein] the corporeal knowledge of a musician’s body and the physical act of music-making can be at the centre of the autoethnographic enquiry and used to explore both the creative process and musical output’ (Bartleet & Ellis, 2015: 10), as I do in the sections that follow. Bartleet and Ellis further note how an autoethnographic approach ‘frees the voice and body from the conventional restrictive mindbody split that continues to pervade academic writing’ (2015: 10). As Ingold (2011: 240) underlines, ‘there is no division, in practice, between work and life. It is a practice that involves the whole person, continually drawing on past experience as it is projected into the future’ (emphasis added). The ‘whole person’ includes accounting for emotions, traditionally excluded from academic prose – even in domains so emotionally imbued as music – but I am encouraged by Robert R Sherman’s (1985) insistence that philosophising begins with emotion; he asserts, ‘humans cannot think effectively, if at all, if they suppress their emotions’ (7); as such, I write herein openly about my emotions in music. Admittedly, some may find it distasteful for me to air my dirty laundry in this way – or to wash it, in the US American idiom – but I borrow again from Sherman, who argues it is better to wash the laundry than to continue to wear it. In the words of ethnomusicologist, Gregory Barz: I have long since given up on objectivity; I am strongly affected [i.e., influenced] by what I have experienced . . . and thus my stories reveal a rather personal engagement . . . In the singing of this [text], therefore, I find it tiresome to feign unemotional detachment; those reactions to perceived authorial reflexivity, subjectivity, and perhaps even self-indulgence that will likely be raised by readers are thus understandable. My stance, however, is not without power, and I do not pretend to adopt a defensive posture. I am present in this story. (2006: 2)

Indeed, more than present, I am wide open here. Friends and colleagues have long told me I read like a book; I hope this Element reads like me. Mark de Rond describes the approach I take to autoethnographic writing, observing of his own work that The writing [is] a vital part of the research;

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I mean to produce evocative and engaging text that reveals to readers as much as possible of the particularities and depth of experience felt, thereby avoiding being ‘dishonest’. For it is thus that readers become privy to the writer’s experience. (de Rond, 2005: xii) By presenting my research in as engaging a manner as possible, I hope to avoid the scholarly pitfall that Ingold (2011) characterises as ‘a language of grotesque impenetrability’ (20). I am optimistic that this text might be accessible and of interest to a readership that includes musicians beyond the realm of the academy. Autoethnography (Denzin 1989, 2014), blending autobiographical writing and perspectives with ethnographic, lived experience, is similar to anthropological autobiography (Brandes, 1982: 202) that focuses on accounting for the individual author-scholar’s experience. Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2011, 2021) challenges norms in his discipline that he sees having drifted too far into the abstract, abandoning experiential understandings to the detriment of scholarship. This iconoclastic stance and, moreover, the impetus that drives it, is why I find autoethnography so ideally suited to my work: ‘unlike more traditional research, autoethnography refuses and disrupts canonical narratives . . . and describes cultural experience as it is particularly – rather than generally – lived’ (Adams et al., 2015: 41, emphasis in original). I realise I am at risk here of conflating aspects of anthropology and autoethnography. Ingold (2011) is at pains to distinguish anthropology from other disciplines and while I agree it is important to define how we do things in particular disciplinary traditions, I am nonetheless fascinated by and especially drawn to where approaches overlap, for as perspectives converge, new sparks of insight are ignited. Although I am not an anthropologist by training, and I am an autoethnographer primarily through habit and inclination, by merging insights from both I can most adequately describe the method of research underpinning the present text. I draw from anthropological work to inform my autoethnographic scholarship and writing in and about music. I hope this might enhance, rather than diminish the text. While agreeing that ‘the real has to be described, not constructed or formed’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: xi), I am reminded that, as well as being descriptive, any writing is also necessarily interpretive, since my descriptions are selective, edited and filtered through my memory, interests and intentions for this Element (Smith et al., 2009). As such, I am ‘at one and the same time player and instrument . . . possessed of sensitivity and memory’ in regard to the experiences for which I account (Diderot, 1966: 157). I seek to interpret my own experience, not to be self-indulgent or to pretend that my own life is any more noteworthy than anyone else’s, but because ‘with understanding yourself

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comes understanding others. Autoethnography provides an avenue for doing something meaningful for yourself and the world’ (Muncey, 2010: 36). Through undertaking this autoethnographic work, I believe I have come to be more sensitive to the depth of others’ experiences and I hope that this continues, that I can be more compassionate and understanding as a musician, scholar, teacher, parent and spouse. Furthermore, as I continue to wrestle with the ethics of studying and writing about others (Hess, 2018; Kallio, 2020), it is a comfort to know that these challenges are perhaps fewer when I am the subject and object of my research (notwithstanding the problematic, reinforced every time I write, of again elevating the voice of yet another White, protestant, anglophone, cis-gender, straight male). As Kuntz (2015: 12) pithily articulates, ‘methodological work is inevitably political’ in various ways, not least in terms of the ‘globalized neoliberalism’ (Kuntz, 2015: 12) that frames and demands relentless, competitive hyper-productivity of contemporary academics conditioned by a culture of ‘acquisitive individualism’ (Docherty, 2018: 38). This Element was admittedly produced in perpetration of the academicneoliberal-capitalist machine; writing it was also a labour of love, about the drumming which helps me to retain my humanity and solidarity with others on this planet (Ingold, 2021).

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Magical Nexus I borrowed the term ‘magical nexus’ from fellow musician-educator, Kevin Shorner-Johnson, who describes how ‘musicians hold and encounter complexities of past, present, and future at a magical nexus’ (2020: 62). ShornerJohnson’s evocative phrase also captures the essence of what I try to describe in this Element – the special conjunction where various phenomena, experiences and understandings intersect, enmesh and comingle to make sense of playing drum kit – that is the magical nexus for which I try to account in this Element. As I explore in the pages that follow, playing drum kit is, for me, a cerebral, bodily, spiritual, liminal, grounded, relational, solo, collaborative and transformational experience. But it is more than that, bigger in volume than what these components comprise. It is a ‘greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts awesomeness that transports [me and musical collaborators] . . . to another plane of being’ (Smith 2013: 185). Ultimately, how the drums matter to me is that they are the place that, most intensely, most frequently, most consistently, most agentively, most reliably, I experience transcendence, or magic. Fellow rock musician and my good friend, Clint Randles (2021), also speaks of ‘that magic of our art form’, saying ‘I don’t know that [music] is anything less than magic’.

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June Boyce-Tillman originated a model of Spirituality, which I have used to structure the contents of this short Element. For Boyce-Tillman, Spirituality is that transcendent, liminal experience that occurs at the magical nexus. Her model extends from recognising what, referencing Damasio (1994), she refers to as ‘Descartes’ error’ (Boyce-Tillman, 2011: 140); that is, the notion that as humans, we think therefore we are. This rational worldview has guided Western philosophy, ideology, arts and education (among other domains of society) since the Enlightenment. However, to understand our engagement with phenomena as purely cognitive and rational is misguided – particularly, I feel, in music. Elision of experience in music studies creates normative disembodied understandings of music that have become embedded as reified epistemological and ontological truths, which are inadequate. Boyce-Tillman asserts that ‘insofar as a musical experience takes us out of “everyday” consciousness . . . and moves us into another dimension, we regard the musical experience as successful, whether we are a composer, performer or listener’ (2011: 266). I would add ‘player’ to Boyce-Tillman’s list of music makers, for it is often in nonperformance contexts – such as rehearsals, jamming, improvising, practising alone – that playing drum kit provides access to this magical nexus. Richard Shusterman (2000) evocatively captures the liminality of transcendent music-making experiences, referring to ‘aesthetic experience’, about which he says, ‘it is essentially valuable and enjoyable; it is something vividly felt and subjectively savoured, affectively absorbing us and focussing our attention on its immediate presence; it is meaningful experience, not mere sensation; it is at the core of what makes art, art’ (17). Boyce-Tillman acknowledges the validity of the term ‘aesthetic’ in accounting for such experiential phenomena, but, because of the particular ways in which ‘aesthetic’ has been deployed in the Western classical music tradition (2011: 172), she eschews the term in favour of ‘Spirituality’. In Boyce-Tillman’s framework, overlapping experience in four other domains provides access to Spirituality: • Materials – the instruments, the body and the technical aspects involved in producing sound as well as the acoustics of the space; • Expression – the feelingful aspects of the experience including those within the sounds themselves (intrinsic) and those locked onto the sounds by significant life experiences (extrinsic); • Construction – the way music is put together – what is repeated, what is changed, the degree of contrast; • Values – the context of musicking and its cultural meaning; These combine to account for Spirituality —a different way of knowing where time and space operate differently (Boyce-Tillman, 2020: 75)

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Although Boyce-Tillman is a minister in the Church of England, she is careful to present her model of Spirituality as non-religious, inasmuch as it accommodates notions of god or gods, religious beliefs and faith, but does not require these. As someone who was once heavily invested in the Christian church– first as an Anglican and fleetingly as a Baptist before dabbling momentarily in emotional Evangelicalism in advance of hitching my teenage wagon to progressive Methodism before abandoning religion altogether – I appreciate Boyce-Tillman’s holistic invitation to Spirituality. However, in a similar vein to her departure from ‘aesthetic’ due to its particular connotations and literature, Spirituality is where I diverge from Boyce-Tillman, in doing so, taking my cue from her also, since she encourages scholars to embrace notions and experiences of magic (Boyce-Tillman, 2011). While it might be possible to explain the workings of liminal musical experience in terms of the brain’s electrochemistry and neuronal connections (Levitin, 2007; Sacks, 2007), this does not account for the actual lived experience, which is often perceived as holistic, other worldly or magical – including by magicians. Professor Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and allegedly among the most powerful wizards to have lived, once exclaimed, ‘ah music, a magic beyond all we do here’ (Rowling, 1997: 95). For me, magic captures mystery and transcendence. I have deliberately avoided theorising magic, as I sought a word that for me was without baggage and that captured what I wish to describe. For some readers, magic may be loaded with as much unease as Spirituality is for me. Nonetheless, it is the word that works for my purposes. I wonder whether magic might be sufficiently removed from normative discourse in the various academic disciplines and fields comprising music studies, to warrant consideration as a term that captures the essence of the sublime, which, by its nature, seems just beyond the reach of articulation. Magic might also appeal to more general readers. Grateful Dead drummer, Mickey Hart, acknowledges the metaphysical realities of creating and improvising at the drums, titling his (1990) book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic; therein he identifies the seamless power of mutually realised rhythms as ‘the magic ride, the groove’ (1990: 231). Guy Richman, a drummer, describes this as ‘a oneness’ (Richman, in Smith, 2013: 98), and fellow drummer, Bill Bruford, calls it ‘the most intense of feelings’ (2009: 347). I have noted before that ‘we are the music. We drummers, we musicians, embody the music . . . Music is a magical thing’ (Smith, 2013: 186). Improvising musician, and mentor to me, Keith Tippett, embodied liminality and transcendence in his music, captured in his solo piano performances and work with the bands Ovary Lodge and Mujician (Fordham, 2020; Smith, 2020). Guitarist Jimi Hendrix,

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aspired for his music to be ‘completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson, 1981: 337), and Paul Clarke says Hendrix ‘proved himself something of a musical “magician” in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder’ (1983: 195). In this tradition, it is in this ‘ancient’ sense I experience playing drum kit as a place of holistic unity – as a magical nexus.

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Correspondences: Accessing the Magical Nexus Access to the magical nexus via the Spiritual/magical elements identified by Boyce-Tillman requires that one is wholly attendant to aspects of these domains. It demands that one is, as far as possible, fully present, open to and engaged in what one is doing and to what is happening around them. Tim Ingold (2021) describes this way of interacting with the world in terms of ‘correspondences’. Ingold’s writing, along with Boyce-Tillman’s work, deals with locating and understanding human experience somewhere between the intimately personal ‘small picture’ domain of psychology and the ‘big picture’ realm of philosophy that generalises about how to grasp and behave in the world. I have previously explored some of this terrain from a cultural psychological perspective (Cole, 1996; Smith, 2013); in this Element, by exploring how playing drum kit profoundly shapes who I am and how I choose to be, I am (to reprise the words of Elliott and Silverman, noted previously), ‘doing philosophy’. Ingold (2021: 11) presents three characteristics of correspondences, which he describes as activities humans undertake diligently and meticulously, for as long as necessary: ‘first, every correspondence is a process: it carries on’ (emphasis in original). This applies especially well in the case of music, which necessarily unfolds in time; to autoethnography, which describes experience experienced in time and to relationships with others (in the case of this text, through music). ‘Secondly, correspondence is open-ended: it aims for no fixed destination or final conclusion’. This also applies to autoethnographic writing, relationships and music; for even when music appears to have an end in a recorded artefact, or a musical relationship appears to conclude, corresponding in various ways with the music and people involved can continue long after an anticipated end. ‘Thirdly, correspondences are dialogical. They are not solitary but go on between and among participants’; among participants, Ingold includes elements of our environment and (by implication) musical instruments. Supporting this point, Ingold suggests ‘we should replace our nouns for naming things with verbs: “to stone”, “to tree”’ and so forth (2021: 7). Thus according agency to all that/whom we encounter affords a changed perspective on musicians’

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interactions with them, opening up the possibility of correspondences. In a similar way, virtuoso bassist Victor Wooten (2006) advocates for an attitude of thankfulness towards all with whom we work. He routinely thanks his bass after practice sessions, rehearsals or concerts; through gratitude towards people and others, we begin to acknowledge them, the parts they play in our lives and we in theirs. Core to this sense of processual, open-ended, dialogical correspondence, is humans’ relationship with materials. Ingold (2011) opines about ‘missing materials’ in scholarly writing, pointing to an ‘academic perversion’ whereby academics only theorise about materials. Boyce-Tillman’s framework, by contrast, foregrounds direct engagement with materials, and I emphasise correspondences with them in the sections on Materials and Construction. I have adapted Boyce-Tillman’s (2020) model of Spirituality in Figure 1, replacing Spirituality with Magical Nexus, and adding correspondence. Correspondences, unlike many transactions and relationships that characterise so much of life in the twenty-first century, are not rushed. We enter into correspondences with care and commitment (Ingold, 2021).

Figure 1 The Magical Nexus, adapted from Boyce-Tillman (2020: 74)

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Correspondences are evident throughout the sections comprising this Element. For instance, when I describe embodied and feelingful aspects of playing drum kit (Sections 2 and 5), this captures correspondences with my instruments and with fellow musicians through the sounds they contribute to our music. The music I make with Stephen Wheel (Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5) is part of a continuing correspondence Wheel and I have maintained in music and friendship for over twenty years. Similarly, musicking with Phil Thomas and The New Titans (Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5) is part of correspondence with fellow musicians, and with a particular musical stylistic tradition, that has extended over more than two decades. Philosophical discussions around, for instance, eudaimonia (Sections 2, 4 and 5) and autotelic experience (Section 5) are indicative of the ceaseless correspondence between me and the scholarly literature that helps me to understand and make sense of what I do; this text is part of that processual, open-ended, dialogical correspondence. Ingold describes his own writing-correspondence process as one wherein ‘I’m writing . . . but I don’t seem to be in control; the book is actually, or whatever I’m writing, is imposing its own form on me’ (2021: 8). I find this is true of my own writing; it happened while I wrote this Element. The same is also true when I play drum kit – to an extent, the band, the song, the venue, my instrument will all give form to what I play. Of course, I have agency in every situation, but often it is in relinquishing control that, perhaps paradoxically, I am freed most to be me. This is also true of my journey and work as a scholar. I have no particular plan as an academic; I await inspiration with a curious mind, that prompts me to read, write, think and drum. I also like to teach in a way that embraces process, open-endedness and dialogue. This approach does not always speak easily to assessment rubrics, syllabi, course structures, learning outcomes, ‘quality assurance’ and other measurable markers that characterise our hyper-neoliberal world as twenty-first-century academics. Nonetheless, when my teaching exists as correspondence with the people in the room and with the world around us, it is at its most ebullient. As Ingold (2021: 243) excitingly affirms, ‘we can be our own philosophers, but we can do it better thanks to embedding ourselves in our observational engagements with the world and in our collaborations with its inhabitants’.

Overview of the Element There is necessarily overlap between the sections of the Element; for instance, content included under ‘Materials’ might equally have made sense under ‘Values’ or ‘Construction’. This overlap is woven into June Boyce-Tillman’s

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model, as the very nature of the Spiritual or Magical is that they are experienced as holistic phenomena. The magical nexus also recalls, for instance, Dewey’s (1925/1958) writing about the embodied human mind engaging with the world, and Noë’s (2009) understanding of how brain, body, others and our environment interconnect and co-constitute one another. As Silverman (2020) explains, when describing how we make sense of our world, humans are ‘simultaneously autonomous and interconnected – through feeling-andknowing – to our contexts and worlds’ (para. 7). I have included writing in each section where it seems best to serve the Element’s arc while trying to balance the lengths of respective sections for a modicum of consistency. Where possible, therefore, I would encourage readers to engage with the text as a whole. Much of the content of this Element has been published elsewhere1, and I draw heavily on my experiences in a handful of music-making projects in which I played, and in some cases continue to play drum kit. However, this Element is the first place in which I have collated many of my thoughts and tried to make sense of them in toto – at least as far as I am able – as a coherent philosophical thesis; in this way, the Element itself is a nexus point (although I would not for a moment elevate my writing to the level of ‘magical’!). I must thank the editor of this Elements series, Simon Zagorski-Thomas, for exercising his faith in my work by encouraging me to write this, and for endorsing my ideas through their publication. As Hildegard C Froehlich and I noted a few years ago (Froehlich & Smith, 2017), a book is never really finished, just abandoned. Our book, like this one, was left in the best condition possible when it was time to stop. The present volume began life as one journal article, quickly growing into two, three and now (at the time of writing) five, with sixth and seventh essays on the way. Each article feels like it’s the final piece of the puzzle, but since that keeps happening, it seems likely that this project will always be work in progress. As I keep changing, and as the world around me keeps changing, the ways in which drumming makes sense both to me and of me will develop as well. The gaps in my explanations, and the points at which my experiences and sense-making depart from readers’ own, are where I hope this Element is of most value. I have thought and written as far as I can for now, and I hope this might prompt others to go farther and do better.

1

This Element draws heavily on the following papers, which are included in the references list but I do not cite throughout because of the extent to which I use verbatim text from them: Smith, 2017a; Smith, 2019a; Smith, 2021a; Smith, 2021b and Smith, 2022. Where I quote from others of my publications, citations are included throughout.

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2 Materials Materials: the instruments, the body and the technical aspects involved in producing sound as well as the acoustics of the space

June Boyce-Tillman (2009: 185) reminds us that ‘all music consists of concrete Materials drawn from the human body and the environment’. In this section, I describe my experience of and relationship to Materials in three categories: (1) my body, (2) my instrument and (3) my environment. All these relationships can be construed in terms of correspondence (Ingold 2021) – taking time to know myself and my human and non-human interlocutors. The three categories necessarily overlap, but each serves as a starting point for exploration of how Materials contribute to the magical nexus.

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Body This section describes some of my embodied experience playing drum kit, primarily rock drumming, following Bruce Benson’s (2011) affirmation that ‘music is experienced in time by fully embodied beings whose experience of music is just as bodily as it is mental’ (590). I begin to discuss here what is for me a core element of playing drum kit: ‘as an actual experience . . . music is a physical phenomenon . . . [and] in the context of music it is not at all contentious to claim that not only experience but knowledge is located in the body’ (Winter, 2013: 108). Richard Shusterman (2008: ix) argues that heightened awareness of our bodies can ‘enhance one’s knowledge, performance, and pleasure’, while Chris Shilling (2000: 6) underscores ‘the necessity of understanding humans as embodied beings’. I would argue that this is absolutely the case with playing drum kit. The movements I make when drumming are often large and effortful, and as I have come to pay closer attention to my embodied understanding in drumming, I have developed a fuller knowledge of myself as a drummer, better able to articulate and enjoy what I do. The main drumming page of my website bears a poem that reads: I am a drummer Drumming is when I am me Then is who I am

The haiku focuses on being and doing in time, so I am increasingly prone to what Larissa Tuisainen refers to as ‘accounting for the concept of presence in performance’, through accounting for the experience of it (2010: 146). In this regard, Shusterman (2008) claims that ‘heightened somatic consciousness can improve one’s use of the self’ (5). Emphasising my drum kit-playing body and my experiences of and in it aligns with Shusterman’s concern for ‘using its

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cultivation for heightened consciousness and philosophical insight’ (2008: ix). For ‘cultivation’ I would substitute learning (entraining my drumming body) to play the music of the various projects and bands to which I refer through this text, and over the longer term the thirty plus years of variously intensive training my body has undergone to be able to play drum kit as well as I do. It is when playing drum kit – especially rock drums – that I am most keenly aware of my ‘body’s role as [my] primordial instrument or Ur-medium’ (Shusterman, 2008: 4); indeed, my body is the instrument that plays the drums. I like to play hard, move big and be loud. I love the immersion I feel in a rock band rehearsal or performance. I am in most situations not a fan of loud noises, or not a fan of them in my ears, anyway. The loudness of sounds I find uncomfortable, but I do like volume, that is, a big size of sound. I have worn earplugs as a drummer since long before I discovered drumming in the way that I now play rock, with big arm movements and making a big sound. So for me rock is less about the loudness itself and much more about doing what it takes to be loud. It is about the physicality of creating the loudness and the immediate feedback of that which I love. This is similar to the way in which I enjoy loud music when driving a car. I do not care for the tinny crashing in my ears of the high mids of the vocals and guitars that are audible over the poor-quality stereo in the van of the Irish punk band I have toured with on and off for many years. However, I love the feeling of the rounded, bassy, throbbing feeling of playing rock music in the smaller space of my own car. The sound envelopes me. Similar, but all the more exhilarating and fulfilling, is the experience of when I create, hear, feel, listen to and react to the sounds when playing the drums in a rock band. When playing drum kit in a band context I enjoyed sinking with each song, improvisation or composition into the familiar comfort of drumming, where ‘you have to be the rhythm in order to play it’ (Smith, 2013: 102). The Materiality of playing drums is ‘delicious’ (Bruford, 2009: 100); ‘the listening and feeling become one in a cyclical, instantaneous intra-personal feedback loop between my head, hands, feet and every sinew of my body; and, on the best days, every part of my being’ (Smith, 2013: 185). Playing rock drums is such a wonderful place of retreat – my home. Although writing as a philosopher, listener and consumer, Theodore Gracyk articulates a point equally salient to performers, noting that ‘rock creates a cocoon of sound’, going on to assert that, ‘physical and sensual, felt and heard, rock invites us to crank the volume and overwhelm consciousness’ (Gracyk, 1996: 107). While Gracyk’s point is about rock’s power over him as a listener, he describes something similar to what I feel as embodied consciousness (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) when making the music. I share Gracyk’s sense of being overwhelmed by rock, or perhaps in thrall to it is

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closer. Moreover, I feel strongly that rock heightens, narrows and focuses my awareness as a musician. Shusterman (2008) contends that as a homogenised and homogenising society today we are experiencing a dearth of attention to immersive bodily experience; ‘too many of our ordinary somatic pleasures are taken hurriedly, distractedly, and almost as unconsciously as the pleasures of sleep’ (6). I spend a large portion of my time typing and sending electronic messages into the ether; my days are punctuated by emails, text messages and social network interactions – such is the modern mode of work (Berman, 1982). The largest record of my presence in the world exists virtually, online; Shusterman suggests ‘the more the new communications media strive to free us from the need for physical bodily presence, the more our bodily experience seems to matter’ (2008: 12). I feel this mattering of the bodily experience, and believe it accounts for a large part of why playing drum kit is such a sanctuary – it is when I feel the most awake, the most me. Daniel Wegner (1994) also advocates for recognising the primacy of the human in what we do, evocatively describing how ‘each human mind is carried around, serviced, and ultimately constrained by an elegant sack of meat, a body . . . The body will announce itself . . . the body cannot be overlooked’ (141–2). Following Merleau-Ponty’s assertions regarding the primacy of embodied understanding it seems appropriate to underline the inherent difficulty – contradiction, even, or irony – in using such an inadequate medium as text to argue for the importance of recognising and privileging embodied knowledge and understanding. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone notes, language is problematic as a means for coping with ‘dynamic events experienced in a directly felt sense by sentient living bodies’ (2009: 363), in part because ‘we experience the world and ourselves in wordless ways before we come to language our experience’. Sheets-Johnstone reassuringly advises, then, that in order to negotiate this tricky issue, there is a ‘need to experience it in person, turning attention to experience itself, acknowledging and in turn examining what is there’ (2009: 365). Here follows a diary entry I made during the course of rehearsing ahead of the debut concert of re-formed NWOBHM band2 V1 in London, England in the summer of 2016: Diary excerpt no. 1 (from V1 rehearsal, 6 August 2016) I love the feeling of hitting the crash cymbals on the button of the groove too, sinking into the metal with the stick as the sound explodes simultaneously with the feel of the right stick striking the crash as the left stick pounds the 2

NWOBHM denotes the new wave of British heavy metal bands hailing from the UK in the late 1970s, including Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Motörhead and Saxon.

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Twenty-First Century Music Practice snare drum or my right foot lands on the bass drum. There are many wonderful moments today – like the in-the-pocket-ness of the syncopated groove in ‘Lights’ that I have never really liked in my conscious mind but which works as a powerful, deeply sunk groove as I feel it, the sound and feeling merging as one with the bass and guitar and my body. (Damn, Dwight is an epic bass player!) Although I have taken two weeks off, the double bass drum patterns seem as solid and intact as before, if not stronger. The tempos feel right – not too fast or too slow – and when I attempt the double-tempo idea at the end of ‘Runner’ it works great, better than ever before. At one point I wonder if I’ll come off my bike, but I just focus again on being in the song. It’s hard to remember what I do there actually, but I think what I do consciously is surrender – I get out of the way and let my legs and arms play the song. I go straight in to the normal time section again without a hitch, wonder why I haven’t managed it before, and hope I’ll be able to reach a state of being where I can pull this off as effortlessly in the gig. A similar thing happens later in the same song, where I build up to constant semiquavers on the bass drum and manage to go to the cymbal and bass drum stabs without event. I have never done this before, but I find myself thinking that I won’t be able to think about this as the song is moving too fast and I haven’t practised it enough to remember a helpful tip, so I relax, let my body do the work and – lo and behold – I land on the stabs with aplomb (again hoping I pull this off on the day of performance!).

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The embodied, time-bound experience of playing drum kit is central to how the activity holds meaning for me. Moving my body, my physical self, to make music – especially creating rock music with others – provides a vital, visceral, immediate (un-mediated) mode of understanding the world and my place in it.

Instrument A few years ago I moved to the USA, having spent the first 40 years of my life living in the UK. Fairly recently I became a permanent legal resident in the US, and until then I had been unable to play drums professionally here, and therefore unable to seek to do so – an altogether disorientating experience, having spent the prior 20 years earning a good portion of my income from playing drums, and always with the option to do so. I relished 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 here 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. I am an amateur drummer, engaged primarily in ‘amateuring’, which Regelski calls time well spent, even when it requires strenuous effort (2007: emphasis in original). Amateur musicians are often not highly regarded;

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‘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’ (2019: 32). 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. I love my drum kits because when I spend time with them, I am able to be me. I also love playing most other drum kits too (drummers often play on whatever equipment is at a given venue – rehearsal studio, performance venue or recording studio), but time spent with my own drums is always a particular pleasure. I delight in removing them from their cases, in their smell, the touch of the rims and heads, and the way they look. Most of all, I love the sounds – so immensely gratifying in all their complex-overtone glory and sensuous, satisfying sonorousness. 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 (see Figure 2), 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

Figure 2 Silver sparkle drum kit and cymbals in my garage

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Figure 3 Rubber pads drum kit in my garage

ordinarily be my go-to. I have a rubber pads drum kit set up in the garage too (see Figure 3), 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 neighbours 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 can’t hear the phone ringing, nor SMS, email or social media notifications above the sound of the drums. Practising provides a beautiful cocoon that shields me from the cacophony of the world. 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

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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 earplugs in the garage because the volume is low and the practice sessions brief enough as not to pose a threat to my health. It has 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 earplugs 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 past several 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. Sound and touch are not so distinct, but are bound up through perception as indistinguishable, or aspects of the same phenomenal experience. When I strike my drums, the hearing and

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feeling are experienced as two parts of the same sense – each is necessary to me for the other to feel real. Percussionist Evelyn Glennie (2009) has called hearing ‘a form of touch’ and said that we ‘hear through the body’. 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’ (2007: 3). 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. Férdia Stone-Davis (2011) captures something of this when she observes how ‘the physical character of musical experience discloses a first-order mode of being, one that involves a suspension of the distinction between subject and object (promoting instead their mutuality)’ (158–159). Playing the drum kit is the nexus of that mutuality – between my bodily, sensual and emotional engagement with the kit and the materiality of the instruments I strike. Playing my drum kit alone is for me a site of self-knowledge, selfunderstanding and self-acceptance: eudaimonia; what Norton (1976: 216) describes as the feeling of ‘being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do’, where that something feels meaningful and worthwhile. It is a site of material, phenomenal understanding as I manipulate tools in service to drumming, sounding a place in the environment.

Environment Crucial components in any drum kit playing experiences are the physical, digital and liminal spaces in which I play, perform and record. For instance, bands I have played in will often rehearse weekly in the same place, since affordable, mutually convenient spaces are not always easy to find, and once familiar with a given studio or room, familiarity makes it easier to practise and experiment as the environment accommodates our musical expressions. The familiarity that comes from always playing in the same space creates a kind of synonymity between drummer, instrument and room as these merge, for I know well (although probably could not verbally articulate) how to play drum kit on particular songs with particular people in a particular space, and that space thus becomes part of the music we play. Any space is integral to the sound experienced by musicians or an audience (when one is present). When a band leaves

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a familiar rehearsal space to play concerts – especially outdoors, where the sound simply disappears, instead of reverberating around the room and enveloping us – the music can feel to varying degrees unhinged and adrift, even when with excellent fold-back or in-ear monitors. I have noted elsewhere how headphones can play a dual role both in connecting musicians at the magical nexus and in dislocating the body and thus much of my musical experience from it, when improvising and recording remotely (Moir et al., 2019). The following is a diary excerpt from 2016, describing the calming, centring effect of playing with a great band in a familiar room; compare this to my recollection of a concert performance with the same band in the following section, Construction: Diary excerpt no .1 (V1 rehearsal, 15 July 2016) I have spent the whole of the last week writing. I have had marking to do, a book to finish and a conference to attend all of next week, so the past seven days I have hardly stopped typing and thinking and typing and reading and typing. I have been quick, efficient, anxious, tired, impatient and stressed. Every moment in my life has been diarised and I have been working intensely and fast. When the bus to band rehearsal doesn’t come immediately I get angry and need to tell myself to calm down – it’s a short trip and I’ll be there in time, which I am. I set up the drums, and guitarist, Terry, arrives with a big, warm handshake and a smile and I feel my shoulders start to relax. By the time we’re halfway through the first song, ‘V1 Rocket’, I feel amazing – totally in control of my world, powering through a classic rock shuffle with the bass guitar next to me pumping in sync with every note of my double bass drum rhythm. For the next three hours everything makes sense – working on corners of songs, finding the right tempos, and playing massive single-stroke fills around kit into the choruses. This is where I can do no wrong, where I belong.

Lockdown Recordings During a period of lockdown during spring 2020, imposed due to the COVID19 pandemic, I played drum kit for a handful of recording projects with friends, including the Sun Sessions EP3 with Stephen Wheel (Wheel, 2020a) and The New Titans YouTube playlist4 with The New Titans (Bushell et al., 2020a). I circle back to recordings with Stephen Wheel and The New Titans throughout this Element. In Boyce-Tillman’s framework, the space in which music is made is fundamental to her construal of ‘materials’. Elemental to the experience of making these lockdown recordings were the spaces in which I created them in 3 4

https://stephenwheel.bandcamp.com/album/sun-sessions-ep www.youtube.com/channel/UCu7pbW-qHflXCweWQKsuYEQ

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my home. I was familiar with playing the instruments in the room for the purpose of practising or revelling in the drum kit’s sound and feel but was unused to recording myself. I worked alone with one $300 microphone on a flimsy boom stand in a thinly carpeted garage with no sound insulation, walled with drums, rockwool, tools, camping gear and other paraphernalia. I had a cheap, two-input USB audio interface, an eight-year-old MacBook Air and an entry-level digital audio workstation (DAW), GarageBand, with no expertise or training in how to use it. GarageBand was the second, digital space in which I worked, complementing the acoustic sound of the garage. Learning to capture, edit and manipulate the recorded sounds in the DAW was entirely new; I was operating in a digital sonic space in which I had not needed, or given myself permission, to work before. I experimented with the few parameters of the microphone and rudimentary audio interface, positioning the solitary microphone above and a bit in front of the drums. I turned the gain (input volume) to a point where the drums were pleasing to the ear when recorded, and where the amplitude of the sound wave in the DAW seemed to represent the full dynamic range of the drum kit without missing or distorting anything. I set up the smaller of my two drum kits because (1) it was capable of about 50 per cent of the volume of the larger kit, so hopefully would antagonise the neighbours to a lesser degree, and (2) there was inadequate room in the garage for the bigger one. I chose three crash cymbals that were quiet (thinking of the neighbours) and characterful (for the rich textural and dynamic possibilities). I sometimes added auxiliary sounds like a China cymbal such as in ‘Old Shoe’5 or mark tree (chimes) and double bass drum pedal in ‘Hero 1’6 (Bushell et al., 2020b). I worked with MoonGel dampening pads to achieve a balanced sound across the kit since I had only one microphone capturing the sound. Following feedback on my initial recording of ‘Moving Away’ (Wheel, 2020b), Audio track: ‘Moving Away’ (Wheel, 2020b) I learned from Stephen to overdub crash cymbals (record them later on a separate track) because their closer proximity to the one overhead microphone meant they momentarily drowned the rest of the kit. I started recording with brushes (far quieter than wooden drumsticks), in part to avoid inviting complaints from neighbours, and because brushes made the drums sound bigger than when struck with sticks; each note lasted slightly 5 6

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOinNGVVdjA www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RYHgbXCvrk

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longer due to the greater surface area of the brush compared to the tip of a drumstick. I occasionally used sticks for Sun Sessions EP (Wheel, 2020a) such as in title track ‘Sun Sessions’ (Wheel, 2020c) where I wanted to play the ride cymbal and that required a stick for the clarity and dynamic to match the rest of the drum kit.

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Audio track: ‘Sun Sessions’ (Wheel, 2020c) When I came to record for The New Titans, I realised that the speed, articulation and intricacy of this music required that I use wooden drumsticks. I picked the ProMark Evelyn Glennie SD740s that are large in the hand but small and light in the tip. A few months later, the guitarist in The New Titans invited me to play ‘Spain’7 by Chick Corea (Corea, 1973), and again I chose the SD740s. Together we bounced and responded lightly to the music in my headphones and danced nimbly around my cymbals and drums. After an extended and emotionally testing period battling GarageBand’s interface, I became increasingly at home in that digital domain. When I recorded dozens and dozens of fills around the kit for ‘Old Shoe’8, I just threw fill after fill into the DAW, letting inspiration and the sound world of the song guide my playing, selecting the best takes to use. I soon craved the focused alone-time to tinker in the DAW, obsessing as I meticulously cut and compiled takes and overdubs for The New Titans. When Stephen and The New Titans emailed or texted me from across the Atlantic to say they were happy with my recordings, I was thrilled and a little proud at my relative mastery of this new environment, encased and enmeshed as it was in the familiar ones of my drum kit, garage and home. Recording Mud Drums On Saturday 6 July 2019, Martin Urbach and I travelled independently to The James L Dolan Studio in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University (NYU) in Greenwich Village, New York City. The studio environment was a familiar space to me as I had recorded here a handful of times with friends, and always with very pleasing results. There was something wonderfully inviting about the room. We both loved the wooden floors, the acoustic panelling, the careful blending of woods and metals and the finely crafted shape of the space with its high ceilings and sound-proofed windows and walls, so that we could make as unholy a drumming racket as we desired, yet be undetected by anyone on the floors 7 8

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Figure 4 Front to back: My acoustic kit, Martin Urbach’s electronic kit and the NYU house kit above and below us, or even in the classrooms and bathrooms adjoining the walls of the studio. We were excited to work here as we could tell there was magic in these walls—it was alive with possibilities! We set up a large acoustic drum kit (me), a small electronic drum kit (Martin), and configured the studio’s acoustic house drum kit (see Figure 4). The recording engineer, Celia Yang, set up microphones and direct inputs to capture the array of timbres and dynamics we hoped to produce. We had opted to play in a recording studio (instead, say, of a rehearsal space) because I had cost-free access to first-class facilities and audio engineers at NYU. We took advantage of this in case it ‘worked’ and we might wish to have a record of it. What we recorded became the Mud Drums YouTube playlist9 (Smith & Urbach, 2019a) We were keen for Celia to capture the sounds of the drum kits in the room, with microphones positioned to record the resonance of all the sound in the space. With the sounds emanating from the electronic kit inaudible in the room, we were delighted when Celia created in the environment of the Pro Tools DAW the illusion of all the kits sharing a sonic space, which she relayed to us both through headphones. Thus Martin and I got to enjoy and respond to the sounds 9

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of the drum kits in the acoustic space of the studio, and to revel in their combined sound in the fabricated, hybrid sonic space in our ‘cans’. The instruments Martin and I played were extensions of ourselves. For instance, my drums are twenty years old and have lived with me in seven homes in four cities in three countries; I have played them on hundreds of concerts and recordings, and know intimately the sonic potential of each drum and cymbal. We each brought our own drumsticks, key parts of the drumming experience that tend to be very personal to individual drummers – again I played the versatile ProMark SD740s. We also played the studio’s house drum kit – a beautiful honey brown, ‘satin natural’ maple Gretsch kit (Gretsch, 2020) that complemented the mahogany wood tones of the studio floor – with the jazz department’s sumptuous set of Zildjian K Custom Dark cymbals (Avedis Zildjian Company, 2020). These instruments – the drums and cymbals – are iconic brands and sounds in the history and culture of American jazz that we both love so well and in which we understood our collaboration to be rooted. Our instruments co-created with us an environment in the studio, intimately connected to our shared Values (see Section 4), meeting at the magical nexus. Martin’s and my respective and shared experiences of the magical nexus with recording Mud Drums recall how Koji Matsunobu describes practices of traditional Japanese musicians who:

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strive to assimilate themselves to the sound, become part of the cosmos, and achieve a state of unity with all things. Spiritual cultivation through sound, it is believed, may be attained through otodamaho by ‘diluting’ one’s self and blending the body and mind in the universe. (Matsunobu, 2007: 1427)

Martin and I certainly experienced transcendence that day, our bodies, instruments and environment conjoining at the magical nexus, exemplified in ‘Mud #8’. Audio track: ‘Mud 8’ (Smith & Urbach, 2019b)

3 Construction Construction: the way music is put together – what is repeated, what is changed, the degree of contrast

In Boyce-Tillman’s (2009, 2011, 2020) model of Spirituality, Construction accounts for what Lucy Green (2008/1988) terms the ‘intersonic’ (2008: xiv) or ‘inherent’ (2008: 19) aspects of music, that is, those elements to which one might more consciously attend when one listens, and to which musicians devote the most attention when practising, rehearsing and recording. In this section, I describe elements of Construction in correspondence (Ingold, 2021) with

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fellow musicians; for as Green (2008/1988) also points out, any apparently intra-musical ways of meaning are always and necessarily wrapped up in culturally located, ‘delineated meanings’ (41). I discuss these further in Section 4: Values.

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Improvisation and Groove For Mud Drums, Martin and I recorded around ninety minutes of improvised drumming over about three hours, pausing somewhere around the middle for fresh air and to avail ourselves of falafel from the legendary Mamoun’s, nearby. We exchanged few words during the day, limiting our discussion to suggestions such as ‘shall we try something a bit slower this time?’ or ‘let’s switch kits and see what happens’. The plan was to not to plan, but to feel, listen and hear – to play drum kit(s). As saxophonist Chris Potter notes, ‘it can be hard to play with musicians who haven’t really learned to play with you, and you haven’t really learned to play with them’ (Philip, 2013: 439). However, on this occasion, we were delighted to find that we met in a deep, mutual groove almost immediately and remained there for the whole day. We went our separate ways after recording and stayed in touch via Facebook Messenger about the recordings Celia Yang, the recording engineer, shared with us that evening. We agreed on some edits to the clumsiest parts of our jamming, cut about fifteen minutes in total, and left the rest as a warts-and-all snapshot of the in-the-moment experience. We contacted audio engineer, Alasdair Kelly, who swiftly mixed and mastered the music to our taste. We uploaded the mixes to YouTube as the Mud Drums playlist10 (Smith & Urbach, 2019a) for us and for anyone else who might be curious. We kept in touch occasionally, usually just to say how excited one of us was to listen again to the playlist. The music Martin and I made was improvised and groove based, that is, consisting largely of repeated rhythmic patterns that we embellished with punctuation, call and response, metric modulations and other elements characteristic of the broad jazz and popular music traditions in which our playing styles are rooted. When we had initially met and discussed possibly drumming together, it immediately became clear how our drumming and respective senses of self were located in the heritage of that drumming tradition. We named shared influences from drumming lineage – icons such as Art Blakey, Ed Blackwell and Rashied Ali, notably in Ali’s almost unfeasibly intense duet recording with saxophonist John Coltrane, Interstellar Space. While our collaboration did not 10

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approach the intensity or brilliance of those of any of our idols, an exciting feature of our collaboration was the ‘unpredictability of improvisation in practice’ (Bramley & Smith, 2017: 443). This element of surprise within a shared cultural-historical framework of contemporary drum kit playing contributes to the ‘participatory discrepancies’ that characterise such infectious and engaging participatory practice. Martin and I made this music for ourselves – ‘amateuring’ (Regelski 2007) – and thoroughly enjoyed the ‘creative tensions’, ‘relaxed dynamism’ and occasional ‘out-of-syncness’ (Keil, 1987: 275) that contribute to the participatory discrepancies constituting the music’s ‘flesh and blood’ (Keil, 1987: 279). In Boyce-Tillman’s (2011) terms, ‘the combination of order and chaos offer the possibility of uniting the Apollonian and Dionysian elements of our culture’ (194). This flow process (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991), and the sense of fun and play with which we entered into and revelled in it (Huizinga, 1976; Gadamer, 2004), are what make this kind of musicking so compelling to do (Heble, 2000), and are what had us both grinning throughout the session and into the next day.

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Creativity and Composition As I described in the previous section, Materials, I worked remotely and asynchronously with Stephen Wheel and The New Titans during the COVID19 pandemic to produce the Sun Sessions EP (Wheel, 2020a) and The New Titans playlist (Bushell et al., 2020a). In contrast to Mud Drums, rather than improvising, I carefully crafted and composed the drum kit parts for these projects. For both projects I began the process of Construction when I learned the arc of each song by listening to them repeatedly. I listened casually with the music in the background a few times before listening with intention while writing out a chart detailing how long different sections were. I decided what rhythms to play and what to emphasise, for instance, along with the guitar in the case of Stephen (he had only sent me guitar recordings to play along with) and along with the bass for The New Titans, as I remembered that their bassist, Phil, liked to ‘lock in’ with my drumming patterns. The next step in constructing the drum parts was to practise them over and over on my ‘practice kit’ – the set of rubber pads that are almost noiseless (compared to a full acoustic drum kit, anyway) that allowed me to play for hours, trying out grooves and achieving the effortless fluidity I sought before attempting to record, without disturbing neighbours or cohabiting family in the process. Stephen’s songs were not recorded to a metronome or click track, so I had to learn each song’s ebb and flow. I liked working this way and had done

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similarly with Stephen many times before. This challenge required that I listen deeply and intently and immerse myself fully in the process of learning each song as an entity. I knew I could record the songs piecemeal and stitch sections together, but it would be more satisfying to nail each song in a single take, as this is how Stephen and I worked together when we recorded music in person. There were some instances where I was unable to record a single take cleanly, such as in title track, ‘Moving Away’ (Wheel, 2020b), where I chose to switch from playing with brushes to sticks, and vice versa (while I could pull these off easily in performance, the changes would create unwanted noise on the recording, so I recorded respective sections separately and glued them together later in the DAW). Recording for Stephen, the Construction usually stopped for me once I had finished the recording. I just sent him the best take for him to use when he mixed the project in his studio. With The New Titans, on the other hand, the recording was a middle part of the process. The DAW became for me a new liminal space in which to construct multiple, complex drum kit and percussion parts as I wished to present them. I spliced different takes together, and added shaker, triangle, tambourine, cabasa, washboard and other percussion parts to complement the drum kit. The fact that the demos I received for these tracks were recorded precisely to a click track meant I was able to be more ambitious with my parts. I recorded numerous versions of rhythms and fills and then selected my favourites. For example, I recorded over eight minutes of fills, to provide just twenty seconds of fills for ‘Old Shoe’11 (Bushell et al., 2020c); the process of Construction here became more layered – I improvised, imagined and played various patterns, and then got to play with them all a second time when arranging them in the DAW. The most intricate web that I wove was in ‘Physh’12 (Bushell et al., 2020d). This was very creatively fulfilling, as I detail further in Section 5, Expression. One aspect of playing original music that I love is that I often get to create or individualise my drum parts and I get to play a role in deciding when they’re right. Even when this is not so much the case in the compositional process of originating the rhythmic pattern to play for a given song (see more on this in Section 5, Expression), whenever I play the song I get to choose, moment to moment, what cymbals with which to punctuate and ornament the music, what fills to play, how and how much to embellish a basic pattern and the degree of dynamic variation that I provide. Often, tempo decisions are mine to make and control in live situations too. As Bruford (2018) notes, this creative work is 11 12

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familiar to drummers and woven deep into the fabric of the drum kit player’s role in musical Construction, enabling us to engage at the magical nexus.13

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Dynamics and Rock Drumming A core characteristic of the Construction of rock music is that it is loud. In terms of the volume at which the music is consumed, this does not distinguish it from the majority of (popular) music; at concerts, in bars and in clubs, the volume at which all music is played is loud. Rock music, however, unlike many other styles of music, is loud at its source (i.e., the musicians making it tend to produce very loud noises as they do so). Loudness is an essential property of rock music, and key to understanding what rock is – understanding both in the normative sense of the Cartesian disembodied mind, as well as physically and emotionally, through ‘another type of intelligibility’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 12). Bourdieu might as well have been (although he was not) referring to playing drum kit in rock music when he wrote of ‘behaviours which engage a corporeal knowledge that provides a practical comprehension of the world quite different from the intentional act of conscious decoding that is normally designated by the idea of comprehension’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 135). This practical comprehension of the essence and ethos of rock music is crucial to its Construction at the magical nexus. As with other many musical instruments, when any component of a drum kit is played with different intensities, the quality of tone produced is different as well as the loudness. The drum kit has a vast dynamic range, and a lot of rock music is made near the top of that range. The quality of tone associated with much rock music is produced by striking the drums hard. Rock rehearsal rooms are generally garages, bedrooms, basements and rented rehearsal rooms of only relatively small proportions of, for example, ca. 35 metres square (see, e.g., Mill Hill Music Complex, 2018). The physical effect of that much sound and expended energy being produced, absorbed and responded to in a space that small can be exhilarating. This excitement and visceral, feral humanity is essential to the experience of playing drum kit in rock music. Famous drummers such as John Bonham, Carmine Appice, Travis Barker, Dave Grohl, Matt Sorum, Brad Wilk, Taylor Hawkins and others are generally

13

Deputising (‘subbing’) for a band’s regular drummer leaves me anxious that I won’t 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’s never fully satisfying as I know I don’t 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’s all so much easier to get right (because since it hasn’t been created yet, it’s way harder to get wrong!). I feel at my most competent making up drum parts for rock music.

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regarded as quintessentially rock players (Weingarten et al., 2016). They are well known for being incredibly loud and for doing things that make loud sounds. Their audiences mostly engage with them via audio and video recordings, where loud sounds are captured and then mixed and blended to create a homogenous sound for the listening consumer. When these drummers perform, they play arenas and stadia, where they need to be massively amplified to reach the audience. These drummers did not begin to play loudly in order to be heard in arenas; in spaces of that size, no acoustic drum kit, however loudly played, would be audible to the paying customers (or, depending on the situation, even much of the rest of the band). These drummers did not start to play loudly in arenas despite careers hitherto rehearsing and working on songs quietly and subtly with their bands. They are successful at rocking out in arenas precisely because of their very well-rehearsed and honed skills in playing songs with big movements, loudly – making rock music. They play rock drums authentically in an aesthetic that I emulate with every chance I get. In almost every band I have played with over the past thirty years (there have been dozens), someone says to me (words to the effect of) ‘the way you play drums really reminds me of [unhinged, feral, very loud drummer] Animal from The Muppet Show’.14 The Animal Muppet character is alleged to have been based on the flailing whirlwind pioneer rock drummer, Keith Moon of The Who. In order to play the drums hard, the energy and movements required for a song or for several songs over (for instance) an hour-long concert or a threehour rehearsal, are considerable. These set off endorphins and a feedback loop of adrenalin and psycho–physical–emotional excitement – a phenomenon that has been explored more in research among athletes than with musicians. The following quote, from Jackson et al.’s work in psychology of sport, explains the need to understand, respect, account for and allow people to experience and do particular kinds of activities that matter to them. I have replaced each iteration of the word ‘sport’ with ‘[rock drumming]’: [Rock drumming] provides a useful setting for examining such psychological concepts as joy, fun, and flow. [Rock drumming] is usually freely chosen, is widely participated in, and occurs in many different forms, allowing for investigation of factors that might impact the quality of participants’ experiences. Emotions not only are visible, but may be more pronounced than in daily life settings . . . Understanding the factors that contribute to a positive [rock drumming] experience is important for those interested in explaining . . . these aspects of [rock drumming]. (Jackson et al., 1998: 358) 14

I should add that Animal was also a very good drummer (played off-set by British jazz great, Ronnie Verrell). Loudness and flailing are not sufficient for any rock drummer – one must of course, first and foremost, play the music.

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I do not claim that drumming is uniquely important, that everyone ought to play rock drums or that rock drumming alone is deserving of attention in the terms indicated by Jackson. Much of what Jackson et al. note about sport could doubtless be applied to numerous other musical and non-musical practices too. My point here is merely that often, in the context of rock music, playing drum kit requires one to be loud and physically active, and this has certain affordances; more of these in the following sections, Values and Expression.

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Rehearsal Realism One of my principal loves of playing drum kit is the fluidity of arcs of movement that are possible only when the drums are approached with a certain level of physicality and momentum. Rehearsing and practising actual movements that will be utilised in performance of rock music is essential for realising it well. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains of the need to rehearse realistically: Though we can speed up a movement or make it larger, the movement is not experienced as the same movement, ‘only larger’ or ‘speeded up’ . . . As actually experienced, the movement is a different movement because it creates a different qualitative dynamic’. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 366) Rehearsals are supposed to prepare players for that for which they are rehearsing. As a veteran drummer of dozens of rock bands on scenes in Brighton, Cardiff and London since 1995, I have never been in a situation where musicians have rehearsed at a volume that was anything different from the volume at which we intended to perform. When I played clarinet in wind bands and orchestras, we never played under the intended dynamics, because we needed to practise, feel, embody and be prepared and confident to produce the sounds needed at all volumes. Different levels of pressure, energy and stamina, and different types of technique are required to play for sustained periods at different volume levels. With the drums, physical endurance is especially important. To play very loudly – as required in much rock drumming – one must expend a tremendous amount of physical energy. In order to be able to play hard and fast for a sustained time, one needs to practise doing just that. Making small wrist movements over and over at a dynamic level of mezzo piano or mezzo forte is no way to prepare the muscles and the cardiovascular system for sustained repetition of the much bigger movements required for playing at high volumes for a live rock show. I accept that also bands need to compromise from time to time, since, for instance, singers may wish to preserve their voices and so not go full throttle into rehearsals.15 But this should not come 15

I fully acknowledge the value of rehearsing song structures by running songs acoustically or by learning them through listening on earbuds while commuting to work or while walking in the

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at the expense of playing rock music as rock music. To practise a loud rock set at a moderate volume would be as ridiculous as to prepare for a 100-metre sprint by jogging it, or to practise for a sub-four-hour marathon by just ambling a handful of miles. However, this is not a reality that is welcomed by all. At frequent, regular intervals over a recent eight-year period I was among the tutors responsible for assessing final-year undergraduate popular music performance students on a course in which they had to replicate various ‘realworld’ scenarios, including auditioning for a touring band, recording a studio session with an artist, and rehearsing musical theatre tunes with a musical director. Frequently, one of my colleagues, a seasoned session musician, would ask each group of students to ensure that they ‘do this one at rehearsal volume’. I thought this was a ridiculous suggestion, especially since students had not been warned ahead of time that they would be required to subdue their playing. It was unfair to all of the students, since none of them would benefit from all that the drummers in each group had to offer; and it was doubly unfair to the drummers who were rendered unable to rely accurately on ‘muscle memory’ as everything would feel different. ‘Rehearsal volume’ implied a profoundly, qualitatively different kind of engagement. It was also triply unfair to the drummers, since the other instrumentalists did get to play with full physical intensity while drummers were hobbled at around 30 per cent, fighting their bodies not to repeat what they had diligently practised. Admittedly, guitar and keyboard players might have to turn down to levels at which their amps did not sound as they might at higher volumes (again producing qualitatively different sounds), but guitar players, bassists, keyboard players and singers could all play with the physical intensity that they would do in ‘real-life’ contexts. What I believe my erstwhile colleague intended was that students play with a level of restraint that would make it easier on the ears of the beleaguered assessors who would spend six hours or more per day during that week assessing live music in enclosed spaces. His stipulation for reduced volume was not, then, unreasonable or even unwelcome from the perspective of the assessors; however, it was musically and aesthetically inauthentic, and denied the drummers, especially, the chance to demonstrate their proficiency on a level playing field with their peers who were making all the same physical movements as they would at any volume. The tutor also made claims about student drummers being able to achieve certain levels of intensity without playing loudly; he was not a drummer and was way out of his depth. While he was accurate up to a point, evening around the supermarket picking up groceries and wine for dinner; these elements of rehearsal do not require loudness, drumming or interaction with the rest of the band.

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playing drums for rock music demands commitment to curating a particular aesthetic experience for oneself and for the ensemble. Besides, monitoring was already provided in every performance room at the school, precisely so that singers and instrumentalists could hear themselves (for instance, over the acoustic sound of a drummer behind them). Earplugs were available at no cost to all students. ‘Rehearsal volume’ should nearly always mean performance volume. Otherwise, precisely what should one be presumed to be rehearsing for? Construction in Concert

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As I noted previously, moment-to-moment Construction and creativity in performance are parts of the drum kit player’s reality. Indeed, what drummers rehearse with our bands includes the manoeuvring in and negotiation of this ‘micro’-Construction along the ‘functional/compositional spectrum’ (Bruford, 2018: 38). Performance conditions are likely to be different from venue to venue and day to day, and even more different from rehearsal conditions, as noted in the previous section, Materials. Construction in performance is always an intense experience. Here follows an excerpt from a diary entry I made following a performance with V1 in summer of 2016, providing a window into my internal Construction monologue: Diary excerpt no. 5 – playing the show, 31 August 2016 The first song, ‘Let me take you higher’, feels like a solid ensemble performance, and the rest of the set bodes well. The cowbell is moving away from me; I’ll fix it later. After my count and fill into ‘Croydon Boys’, both the bassist and the guitarist miss the start. This knocks me off balance – the song feels rushed and unsettled throughout: is that my adrenaline and irritation, or the actual tempo fluctuating? ‘Devil Devil’ feels more confident, although I overanalyse every note and phrase, unable, as a result, to get into it. The bassist begins ‘She’s so easy’, but I need to fix the bass drum pedal that has slid unhelpfully across the floor. I signal the guys to continue and the guitarist starts noodling over the bass line. The song eventually goes all right – we nail a decent shuffle groove in places, then the singer loses the structure completely! I try to signal the end by diminuendo-ing dramatically, then he comes in belting a chorus, the guitarist cranks up again and I follow. When we finally stop, the ending is tight enough but we are in danger of overrunning our time. ‘Lights’ feels good till I misinterpret the end of the guitar solo (dammit!), although the bassist catches me in less than a beat, nearly disguising the mistake. The intro to ‘Rock Star’ is tight, loud and aggressive, and I am especially pleased with my execution of the guitar ‘stabs’ ornamented by my bass drum, floor tom and snare drum flourish. This song flows and I finally start to experience the feelings and sensations I crave. ‘V1 Rocket’ feels very grooving indeed as the triplet bass-and-drums pattern

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rumbles the room! I stumble on some fills because I allow myself to start thinking, and consciousness gets in the way again at the end, in the very last few notes where I rush the footwork and end up with my feet finishing just ahead of my hands. I scream internally, as I worked so hard to get that just right. I knew I needed to relax! ‘Ready for action’ follows the previous two songs by proceeding with speed and intent (I even remember to reposition the cowbell). I finally feel my body relaxing through the home straight of the set. The double-bass-pedal fills with the bass guitar are spot-on, and it feels like the music is working. ‘Runner’, the closer, canters along well, feeling powerful and tight. My double-tempo section at the end with double pedals works fine, I think, although it feels different from every other occasion I’ve played it, like my feet are trying to run away from me, but I just manage to rein them in. Something has happened to loosen the hi-hat mid-song so I lose definition and nuance by the end: a minor frustration, but still irritating. Immediately following the gig I am struck by the depth of emotion that performances bring out in me. I feel despondent on account of a combination of factors impinging on my ability to focus on the ‘now’ of the performance and to allow the aesthetic experience to happen. Before we started playing, the singer was unhappy about taking ages to park his car (at some expense) and the guitarist disliked his sound throughout. The sound guy was late to our sound-check, leaving us insufficient time to gauge the room and get settled. I didn’t much feel like I had the opportunity to just enjoy the experience like I do in rehearsals. The show was mostly good in places, though; the Texas shuffle in the ‘She’s so easy’ guitar solo worked great; my tom fills in ‘V1 Rocket’ were really satisfying; the trickier rhythms in ‘Devil Devil’ and ‘Lights’ flowed along great. ‘Rock Star’ felt possibly the best, but the hi-hat work wasn’t as clean as I’d hoped for and know I can easily produce. I am an emotional wreck by the end.

In this section, I have discussed various aspects of Construction, improvisation, composition, dynamics, a rock aesthetic and some of the myriad points of reflection that arose during a performance in a rock band. Commonalities of Construction across these examples are activities that comprise the doing and making of music in real time, combined with reflection that informs and is informed by action. ‘Stepping back’ to consider the Construction happens moment to moment while creating, in between activities on a given project, and through more deliberate contemplation, such as diary entries or writing this text.

4 Values/Culture Values: the context of musicking and its cultural meaning

June Boyce-Tillman (2011: 216) notes that ‘all musical pieces stand in relation to the culture in which they are created’, and that ‘the creative process itself will

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also contain a particular value system’ (220). In this section, I describe the realisation of live and recorded music – dialogical processes of correspondence (Ingold, 2021) – with friends and other musicians. These correspondences take place between me, the other musicians and the culture and values that inform and permeate our collective music making.

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Mutual Musical and Extra-Musical Values During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic ‘lockdown’ in Pennsylvania I found it hard to concentrate. I was constantly and intensely anxious, confused, uncertain and afraid, plus I felt guilt and shame from having the privilege of staying safely at home and of not being a frontline worker. I found music was a source of sanctuary and solace during those strange and unsettling times. Playing drum kit with others (albeit asynchronously) helped me retain and maintain my sense of self and purpose: eudaimonia (Norton, 1976; Waterman, 1992). When friends invited me to play drums with them, I jumped at the chance – something that might make me feel good! A way to connect with people! A focus in this newly horizon-less time of apparently perpetual hiatus! I did not articulate or realise my motives at the time. I acted on instinct. As noted earlier, I did not yet know if I was even capable of satisfactorily recording the drums. Philosopher Susan Wolf (2009) explains that this kind of responsive spontaneity is often how curating meaningfulness works: ‘because meaning requires us to be open and responsive to values outside ourselves, we cannot be preoccupied with ourselves. If we want to live meaningful lives, we cannot try too hard or focus too much on doing so’ (52). I did not instigate these projects, nor consciously seek meaningfulness through them. Rather, I was reminded, during and long after the process, that these were where I could find meaning. At the time of writing, a year-plus hence in the mid part of 2021, I am trying to better understand and articulate what happened. As Wolf (2009) articulates, I experienced, ‘meaning [as] something we want for ourselves and others’ (49); ‘I [was] drawn by the particular values of my friend[s] . . . they are values I respond to, for which I have an affinity – a subjective attraction, if you will’ (2009: 51). Stephen and I are very close. He has called me his John Bonham (famed drummer and engine room of pioneering heavy blues/rock band, Led Zeppelin) and his Uma Thurman (an actor whose performances are integral to several films directed by Quentin Tarantino). Stephen and I had formed the deepest of bonds making music together. We lived in the same house for years, and I have been the only drummer on the scores of songs Stephen has written and recorded since the late 1990s. The Sun Sessions EP (Wheel, 2020a) was about the values of friends and family. The lyrics were explicitly about spending time with loved

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ones, like ‘Escape to Blue’ (Wheel, 2020d) on which Stephen invited me to contribute lyrics about spending time outdoors during the pandemic with my daughter.

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Audio track: ‘Escape to Blue’ (Wheel, 2020d) I was delighted to contribute in this way to an album that was about our friendship and shared love for our families – capturing this particular pandemic moment ‘like a Polaroid’ (Stephen Wheel, personal communication, 2021). Stephen told me that the only people he needed to like this music were me, his wife and himself; if we three were happy, it would all have been worth it for him. And I only needed Stephen, my wife and my parents to endorse it, really. I was glad when they did. The players on The New Titans did not explicitly discuss the values underpinning our collaboration. However, I was invited to the project by Phil Thomas, a bass player with whom I had been friends for twenty years. Phil and I had bonded over admiration for overtly technical and complex music played by progressive rock bands such as Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater. Unlike with Stephen’s music, it seemed that with Phil and The New Titans it would be impossible to play too many notes. While the bass playing on the demo tracks I received was sometimes understated, there was plenty of showoff lead guitar playing and I heard room in there that I suspected the band would like me to fill with my ideas. The first track they sent me to play on, ‘Beaver’16 (Bushell et al., 2020e), reminded me strongly of tunes by Snarky Puppy, a US/ UK jazz–rock–hip-hop fusion ensemble full of cutting-edge musicians and tasty, slick, dance-able, virtuosic playing. Demonstrable instrumental prowess, then, seemed to be the name of the game, and Phil said to just play whatever I wanted. I liked the sound of that. And they kept every note that I played in the final recordings. The participants in both projects shared some overlapping aesthetic Values. Firstly, we were all perfectionists – meticulous in our playing, recording, arranging and production decisions. There was never any room for sloppiness; we set our respective and collective bars high and we jumped them cleanly. Secondly, we were making the music for ourselves; none of us had any serious commercial ambitions for the music. We had no marketing or promotional nous, and no one among us had the skillset, patience or desire to seek agents, management or reviews. Making the music was eudaimonic (Norton, 1976) and put me in a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991).

16

www.youtube.com/watch?v=InubcabVKO4

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Black Belt Jesus and Black Light Bastards When I moved from England to the USA and for various reasons was unable to play regularly in a rock band for more than two years, this created a hole in my soul. I had not not been in a band for thirty years. In summer 2019, 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 (BBJ) – 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 started playing the epic, repeated riff that announces the mid-tempo rock song, ‘Bo Huesley’. The playing was loud, immersive, intense and feral. Our sound embraced me while we played together. It felt like a magical mix of a hot bath and finishing a marathon. Everyone was into it – laying down fat, phat beats and riffs, by and in which we were entirely consumed and enmeshed. 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 replied, ‘it takes you off the planet for a while – it’s peaceful’. He was right – everything else had melted away while we played and we shared an immersive, collective experience that none of us could create without the others. Boyce-Tillman (2011) observed of the singing bowl tradition, that ‘this sound produced with reverence, an understanding of and connection with the “feel” of a particular group and with the intention of calming and healing the people present, can have an amazing effect’ (144). BBJ experienced that effect in our own shared tradition of stoner rock. This shared and personal experience is a large part of why I play. When I am drumming, the feeling in my body, and the conscious, embodied knowledge that I am core to the band creating and perpetuating the sound that I hear and feel around me, compel me to continue making the music, making and luxuriating in the perpetual now. The unmediated, non-verbal communication of rocking out collaboratively is a tonic for my soul. Playing drums in a rock band is vital to me being a human and to feeling that I belong. Erikson explains this 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’ (1950: 50). It perhaps seems silly and reeks of detached social privilege to say I ‘need’ to rock out once a week or so, but I do. I have to do it. I feel as de-centred and unhinged

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when I don’t have this sustenance as I do when I’m away from family, deprived of sleep or don’t eat well. BBJ parted company in less than a year following a disagreement about the importance of social distancing and mask-wearing during a pandemic. So, following BBJ’s last rehearsal in February 2020, I was stripped of and denied that intense rock immersion for ten more months. Then two local musicians contacted me through their website and, after, some back and forth, we got together and jammed (with masks). The feeling was euphoric! The release, after so long, was phenomenal. And co-creating our music together in the months since then has brought us to the magical nexus. This band is called Black Light Bastards17 (BLB). When BLB plays our full gigging set in rehearsal or in concert, I feel invigorated and fully alive! (See Figure 5.) Together we soar on a magic carpet up and out of the room to another plane for three or four minutes at a time. After playing together for nearly eight months now, BLB can run through our set, top to bottom, with no major hiccups, although I still sometimes forget what groove to play at the start of a song, and I still might hesitate ahead of the interlude that comes before ‘Stare’ (Larsen et al., 2022),

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Audio track: ‘Stare’ (Larsen et al., 2022) where I have to trigger space sounds downloaded from NASA and other sound effects to give the band a breather before we take the set home. I love the focus I find playing drum kit in a rock band (see Figure 6). It’s there to a lesser extent in other contexts like jazz combos and pit bands, but the physicality, the bigness and, yes, the loudness of being in a rock band are intensely thrilling; exhilarating. People often say things to me like, ‘Oh, it must great to take all your frustrations out on the drums!’ Alas, it is not. Of the handful of occasions I have played drums angrily in the thirty-three years since I started, all have been roundly unfulfilling, even disappointing. Playing drum kit with my full cognitive, emotional and physical presence allows me to channel my full being into the now – the immersion is what’s so great about it. It is an escape to being fully present, and to being authentically me.

Cultural Authenticity Allan F Moore is one of few scholars to have discussed authenticity in rock music, and he suggests considering authenticity as construed in three ways. Surmising that authenticity is ‘ascribed, rather than inscribed’ (2002: 210), he parses 17

https://blacklightbastards.com/

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Figure 5 Black Light Bastards performing in Maplewood, New Jersey, USA, in summer 2021. (Courtesy of Gramm Photography) ‘authenticity as authentication’ (2002: 209), inhering not in music ‘itself’, but in its perception and reception by those who experience it. Moore writes:

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Authenticity of expression, or what I also term ‘first person authenticity’, 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 with an audience. (Moore, 2002: 214)

This type of authenticity resonates most strongly with me playing drum kit in rock bands, although the impression of integrity is one felt and understood in the first person, that is, very much by and to myself, and shared with my performer collaborators, more than it is necessarily communicated to an audience. For me, this authentication precedes, and is integral to, the communicative moment that Moore describes. Moore (2002) also proposes ‘Authenticity of execution, or what [he] also term[s] “third person authenticity”. This arises when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another, embedded within a tradition of performance’ (218). While I recognise this kind of authenticity, for me, again, it is less about conveying to audience and much more about sharing and creating with fellow collaborative musicmaking band members in the moment, mutually experiencing meanings of the music. This seems to be an essential component of Moore’s authenticity of expression, preceding what he lays out as authenticity of execution. I am only able to express integrity (and that integrity can only make an impression on others present) once we acknowledge, tacitly or otherwise, our shared ‘tradition of

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Figure 6 Me playing drum kit at the Black Light Bastards gig in Maplewood, New Jersey, USA, in summer 2021. (Courtesy of Gramm Photography) performance’ (Moore, 2002: 218). Jean-Luc Nancy (2007) affirms ‘the sonorous as tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion)’ (10), and for me this experience of the sonorous is greatly heightened through simultaneously and collaboratively creating that which is experienced. As a player or performer, then, authenticity may be less about conveying an impression and more about co-generating, co-constituting and collectively maintaining authenticity in and though the music. I like to be part of co-creating in real time what Mickey Hart calls the ‘magic ride’ and what is widely known as the groove or pocket. This being said, however, I do not especially love playing a jazz groove or a funk groove, or a groove that is ticking along nicely in the pit of a fringe musical theatre show (and goodness knows, I have played hundreds enough of those to know). I love, need, crave and feel the irresistible allure of the feeling – physical and emotional – of playing a rock groove; completely absorbed in the song, the music is all I hear, all that I am in those moments. Going into the music, I am happy to descend, contented to be enveloped by it entirely. Being in a song, or in a piece of music, is like a total immersion of my self – emotionally, mentally and physically. I am perhaps the most satisfied when I come off stage or out of a rehearsal sweaty as hell, having worked out hard and long and known the power of a huge flowing groove for the best part of an hour or more. This ‘drummers’ high’ is, like ‘the runner’s high’ that I also know and love, a euphoric state related to release of endorphins (Boecker et al., 2008).

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The next best thing to rocking out – or perhaps I value it equally but at different times – is playing improvised music, such as with Martin Urbach. On the day of our recording, Martin and I did not give much conscious thought to intersonic meanings of the music we made beyond listening intently and responding to one another to co-create something in real time. Our shared understanding, unarticulated on the day but resonating from prior conversations, was that we wanted to do something which sounded and felt like it was part of our culture as drummers, a strand in a culturalpsychological collective I have called a ‘web’ extending through history and cultures (Smith, 2013: 169). As Bruford notes, ‘Drummers think not only as individuals and human beings, but as members of a particular community with distinctive cultural traditions that allows us to ascribe meaning to creative experience, and to circulate and exchange that meaning’ (2018: 7). Fellow drummer-scholar, Dylan van der Schyff argues ‘there is a strong sense in which improvisation may be seen as a meeting place for the present and the ancestral, the individual and the group, tradition and innovation’ (2019: 319). George E Lewis terms this an ‘Afrological’ approach to improvisation – deeply rooted in memory and history (1996: 147) (Lewis is keen to emphasise that the concept and designation of ‘Afrological’ is ‘historically emergent rather than ethnically essential’ (1996: 133)). Mickey Hart (1990) sees this as drummers being ‘rhythmically related, and in drumming that’s the same as blood’ (213). As a drummer steeped in traditions of playing drum kit, my subjectivity both informs my contributions to particular musical situations and is a product of culture I have absorbed and in which I am enmeshed. The personal and cultural become deeply intertwined and are thus inseparable, in a similar way to that in which Lucy Green (1988/2008, cited in Section 2: Construction) describes the utility and the futility of trying to parse music’s intersonic meanings from its delineated ones. Authenticity and authentication in playing drum kit are constantly negotiated and reinforced, as I outline further in the next section, on Expression. In all my playing drum kit with others, I concur with H Stith Bennett’s assertion that ‘the “goal” of cultural work is . . . to share experiences of “the good” which are intrinsically rewarding’ (1980: 15). Martin and I affirmed this need in a conversation, post-recording: Martin: Gareth:

When we get older we sometimes forget that this music thing changed our lives . . . gotta keep it alive

I drum, therefore I am.

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5 Expression Expression: the feelingful aspects of the experience including those within the sounds themselves (intrinsic) and those locked onto the sounds by significant life experiences (extrinsic)

June Boyce-Tillman explains how the domain of Expression ‘is concerned with the evocation of mood, emotion (individual or corporate), images, memories, an atmosphere on the part of all those involved in the musical performance. Here the subjectivity of all those involved in the musical event intersect’ (Boyce-Tillman, 2009: 186) – a process of interpersonal correspondence through music (Ingold, 2021). Furthermore, Boyce-Tillman writes, ‘expression . . . is important for the development of self-awareness and the development of authenticity – a person’s sense of what constitutes The True for them’ (2011: 178). In this way, then, this section combines my observations from previous sections – continuing the openended, dialogical correspondence of writing – bringing my account closer to where Materials, Construction, Values/Culture and Expression combine at the magical nexus.

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Feeling Right, Feeling Me Through engaging in conversations with scholars and fellow musicians (many of my interlocutors were both), I have come increasingly to accept that my primary mode of expression as a drummer is in and through rock music. This preference is doubtless evidence of my upbringing and background, what Bourdieu (1984: 101) termed ‘habitus’.18 I have long felt pressured both to be more sophisticated in my music making and to want to play subtler musics, so it took me a long time to accept that rock drumming is my solace. But the conventions and aesthetics of rock music allow me to play in an uninhibited fashion – I am permitted to be me. When I play rock drums, I exemplify an altered version of Moore’s (2002) authenticity of expression and authenticity of execution – that is, authentication of my own expression, and authentication with fellow band members of a shared cultural understanding about what rock drumming and rock music are. I play music in a style that recalls tropes which resonate with others familiar with experiencing rock music, and in so doing I ‘represent the ideas of another’ (Moore, 2002: 218). I do this another way, too,

18

Although I grew up surrounded by numerous musical genres and styles, I learned from my father – to whom for years I ascribed absolute pedagogic authority (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) when it came to music – that rock music was really the best; as I put the finishing touches to this manuscript I am visiting my parents and every evening Dad presides over the television as we watch concerts he has recorded over the past few years for me to watch with him.

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for as a drummer I am almost always helping to realise another person’s music, to bring it to greater life. While I have always found it very rewarding to play Stephen’s music, I have also learned that it is really his music, in the service of which I play. Stephen and I often negotiate drum parts, but he gets the final say, as the songwriter/arranger/ producer. I have a good instinct now for what he likes, and on the Sun Sessions EP (Wheel, 2020a) I only had to completely re-record one of the songs because we had respectively envisioned different grooves for it. I play really comfortably with Stephen and for Stephen; but it is less about me expressing myself musically. So, whereas Stephen’s Sun Sessions recordings (Wheel, 2020a) were primarily an expression of our in-person relationship, in The New Titans we were making slick jazz–rock fusion that enabled me to express myself with more creative flair and to tap deeper into my drummer skills. These musicians trusted me to play whatever I chose. They never asked me to record alternative drum parts, and never took out any of what I played. I had complete artistic autonomy, which was exciting and freeing. Reciprocally, I was always interested to hear how they mixed the tracks, and whether my imagining of the drum parts matched theirs (I never asked them to change what they sent me). While I knew Phil and the other members of The New Titans less well than I knew Stephen, the music of The New Titans was in some ways more exciting to play. The Sun Sessions EP (Wheel, 2020a) felt more necessary and meaningful to me as a human. The two projects allowed me, respectively, to express different, vital components of myself as a drummer. With Stephen, I was giving and loving in the performances I recorded for him as a close friend, and with The New Titans I was able to perform the role of a creative drummer and craft my own rhythmic-sonic palette. In both cases, and for different reasons, my drumming was effervescent. Bill Bruford (2018: 38) describes these two types of performance as existing towards either end of the ‘functional/compositional continuum’ along which he situates drummers’ work. Both projects had me in a state of flow. With Stephen the challenge was to nail the vibe and make the music sound live and organic; my role was almost entirely functional, hardly creative or compositional at all. With The New Titans, on the other hand, the challenge lay in pushing myself to create intricate, sophisticated parts and combine them into a coherent whole – my role in and contribution to this group were much more compositional. Purpose and Eudaimonia Playing drum kit is at the core of what it means to be me, comprising part of what Laing would call my ‘ontological security’:

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The individual, then, may experience his own being as real, alive, whole; as different from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that his identity and autonomy are never in question; as a continuum in time; as having an inner consistency, substantiality, genuineness, and worth; as spatially co-extensive with the body . . . He thus has a firm core of ontological security. (Laing, 1960: 41–42)

Waterman (1992: 57) writes in similar terms, describing ‘the strength of a person’s investments in particular identity elements and the centrality of that identity to the manner in which she or he chooses to live’. This orientation to the pursuit of one’s true purpose has been called ‘eudaimonism’, which Norton sees as an ethical choice, arguing that ‘living one’s own truth constitutes integrity, the consummate virtue’ (Norton, 1976: 8). For my own part, ‘for as long as I can remember I have found fulfillment through every aspect of being a drummer . . . Drumming is my sanctuary. I have to make time for making music. Being a drummer is central to who I am’ (Smith, 2017b: 151). Playing drum kit is time-consuming and expensive – it requires me to own a car, to load and unload the car, to travel to rehearse, perform and record and to make the albums I feel I need to make; I frequently break drumsticks – one per show is about standard but I shred many more in rehearsals and once destroyed three during one song on a gig with an Aerosmith tribute act. I break cymbals (very costly to replace) from time to time and wear drumheads down so they too require frequent replacement. No rock drumming gig I have done has ever ‘wiped its own face’ in terms of accrued expenses. But I love to play drum kit regardless. There is a collective thrill that arises when everyone in a band (plus sound crew and others) does what needs to be done to make rock music. There is undoubtedly a NOW-ness to making rock music that I love; the now is what matters the most, for as I have already noted, it is in being fully present that one can reach the magical nexus. Drummers Bill Bruford, Ian Paice, Sean Lee and Guy Richman all talk of reaching and aspiring to this transcendence in drumming, the elusiveness of that transcendence, and their desire to chase it night after night in performance (Smith, 2013). Bauman (2012) describes individuals who live this way as possessing an autotelic personality, seeking optimal, flow experiences that exist at the crossroads of challenge and reward. Csikszentmihalyi (1991) writes that people with an autotelic personality do things for the sake of doing them, rather than in order to attain later, external goals. Wrigley and Emmerson (2013: 2) 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’. 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 playing drum kit, but are not, or at least not mostly, intrinsic to it.

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Schmid, writing about sports, and whose findings and assertions I find analogous to playing drum kit, notes that ‘the philosophical literature defines autotelic play as an activity pursued for factors intrinsic to the activity’ (2011: 3). Schmid, however, ‘find[s] this conception of autotelic play and its justification unsatisfactory’ (2011: 3). 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 (recalling Wolf, 2009) terms a ‘hedonistic’ account, ‘it is not the activity itself that is intrinsically valuable but [my] enjoyment or pleasure derived from the activity’. Norton identifies eudaimonism’s closeness with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1991) construct of ‘flow’, and differentiates the concepts, insofar as flow explains obtaining and maintaining optimal or peak experiences for shorter periods, whereas eudaimonism is characterised by being true to oneself, which can in turn lead to more frequent feelings of flow. In this vein, Wrigley and Emmerson (2013: 12) note that ‘the flow state has been likened to a eudaimonic experience of wellbeing, in which human growth and potential are emphasized’. Thus the volitional necessity (Frankfurt, 1998) I feel to play drum kit, is a compulsion both hedonic and eudaimonic –notwithstanding that these two types of happiness are oft presented as alternative to one another (Waterman, 1992, 2013; Ryan et al., 2008). I would say I have an autotelic personality. Rock drumming for me is a particularly autotelic experience. I do it because I need to feel that autotelic experience as part of a meaningful life being me. I do it because it is valuable to me in and of itself.

Feeling and Listening Jean-Luc Nancy (2007) suggests that Western philosophy has neglected listening in preference for an emphasis on thinking, reflection and understanding, and he urges a corrective to this focus. Core to my thesis, then, is that deeply attentive listening is vital to a philosophy of playing drum kit. I have called this ‘experiential listening’ (Smith, 2013: 184) and it is the realisation (in both senses) of something my drum kit teacher and mentor, Pete Fairclough, told me: ‘the only thing you should be doing consciously on stage is listening’. At the time, back in the mid-1990s, I took Pete to mean I should hone my technique and reading abilities and learn repertoire so I could concentrate on blending with the band around me, but I now know he meant something more profound as well – that in order to make the music that as drummers we are duty bound to do, in an ensemble of which we are but one part of a more complex organism, we

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need to devote ourselves wholly and fully to that moment.19 I am reminded of Pauline Oliveros’ profound words, about improvisatory performance, which resonate (pun intended) with my philosophy of playing drum kit:

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When I arrive on stage, I am listening and expanding to the whole of the space/ time continuum of perceptible sound . . . What I perceive as the continuum of sound and energy takes my attention and informs what I play. What I play is recognized consciously by me slightly (milliseconds) after I have played any sound. This altered state of consciousness in performance is exhilarating and inspiring. The music comes through as if I have nothing to do with it but allow it to emerge through my instrument and voice. (Oliveros, 2005: xix)

Oliveros appears to speak for me again when she adds, ‘it is even more exciting to practice, whether I am performing or just living out my daily life’. To reiterate an earlier point, the magical nexus can be found in practice and in rehearsal as well as performance and I have described elsewhere how I feel like a drummer in all I do (Smith, 2019b); I feel as though I approach many tasks and roles in my life as I do playing drums in an ensemble; I am mostly in the background, supportive, taking the lead where needed then stepping back; I would rather create from scratch than follow instructions or use others’ ideas; I love working with friends and much prefer small groups over larger ones; I improvise a lot and like to do so in interaction with peers. Don Ihde (2007) writes about ‘sound beyond human hearing’ when talking about vibrations that are too quiet to hear (264). This is helpful for considering aspects of how I experience sound and its production as I play drum kit. As noted earlier, in the Section titled ‘Materials’, Percussionist Evelyn Glennie lights on this when she explores hearing and listening through different parts of the body, stating that ‘hearing is a form of touch’ and that we ‘hear through the body’ (Glennie, 2009). Nancy (2007: 3) tentatively positions the type of somatic knowledge I experience as existing ‘between a sense (that one listens to) and a truth (that one understands), although one cannot . . . do without the other’. Nancy (2007: 10) further asks how it is that sound has ‘a capacity to affect us, which is like nothing else, and is very different from what has to do with the visual and with touch?’ In the context of playing drum kit, sound and touch are – as Glennie also identifies – not so distinct, but are bound up through perception as indistinguishable, or aspects of the same phenomenal experience. When I strike my drums, the hearing and feeling are experienced as two parts of the same sense – each is necessary to me for the other to feel real:

19

Pete Fairclough and I corresponded via email in July 2021, and he confirmed he indeed had this deeper meaning in mind.

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The listening and feeling become one in a cyclical, instantaneous intrapersonal feedback loop between my head, hands, feet and every sinew of my body; and, on the best days, every part of my being. The loop is also interpersonal, and how I wish it could be every time I play. I find it frustrating when I (or we) cannot achieve this sense of oneness, of total submersion, for whatever reason. (Smith, 2013: 185)

There really is nothing like a mutual groove, greater than the sum of its parts, and rooted in focused, intense, mindful listening to and among all the sounds around us (Bramley & Smith, 2017). Thinking about listening in these ways emphasises the truly collaborative, integrative nature of making music that is especially vital to playing drum kit, which functions primarily as an ensemble instrument. Evidence of their fully present, attentive listening is a characteristic of all musicians with whom I find it rewarding to play; if I’m going to be listening intently, I expect the same from my collaborators! This experiential listening to one another’s respective and our collective sounds recalls Takemitsu’s (1995) characterisation of the practice of traditional Japanese musicians, for whom their art is holistic, expansive and spiritual: they derive ‘more meaning in listening to the innate quality of sound rather than in using sound as a means of expression’ (56–7). As Matsunobu (2007) underlines, Takemitsu’s observation ‘seems to emphasize the importance of the art of impression rather than the art of expression’ (1431, emphasis added). While Takemitsu and Matsunobu discuss Japanese musicians whose sound world is rooted in the natural environment rather than in amplified rock music, I recognise privileging a more inward focus on the band and our sound, as integral to successful music making at the drum kit (Smith, 2013). When rocking out with a band all playing at an appropriately loud volume (size of sound), I cannot usually hear the bass drum I am battering repeatedly with the entire weight of my right leg, unless it is also played back to me through monitors; I do not trust the sensation of playing the drum unless I also hear it simultaneously; I experience the low frequencies of the bass drum in fold-back as feeling, as much as I hear them as sound. Nancy explains a crucial part of this phenomenon, noting ‘sensing . . . is always a perception [ressentir], that is, a feeling-oneself-feel [se-sentir-sentir]’ (2007: 8). As Salomé Voegelin explains, ‘sound . . . is its immediate sensibility’ – ‘the aesthetic moment is the now in which sensation meets perception’ (2010: 182). Lori Custodero further affirms, ‘feedback is immediate . . . we can feel music in our bodies as we perform and listen to it . . . Action and awareness merge . . . doing and thinking are fused together and we can be fully present in the moment of musical creation’ (Custodero, 2010: 72). This immediate (that is, unmediated) knowledge that there is no time to articulate

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in the moment, and that can only be comprehended in performance and by playing the drum kit, is what Merleau-Ponty (1945) calls ‘another type of intelligibility’ (12) in which ‘consciousness derive[s] its clarity from sensation’ (17). I am, in Denis Diderot’s words, ‘at one and the same time player and instrument’ (1966: 157). Nancy observes what he terms ‘sonorous time’, which: takes place immediately according to a completely different dimension, which is not that of simple succession . . . It is present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified . . . that stretches out or contracts. (Nancy, 2007: 50)

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In a similar vein, Ihde observes how ‘sound dances timefully within experience. Sound embodies the sense of time’ (2007: 85). In grappling with this ineffable, yet tangible experience(ing) of sound in time, Voegelin (2010) writes of ‘the complexity of a timespace moment’ (171) and ‘the sonic now’ which are experienced as ‘an expansion of experience in timespace’ (164). She also refers to the ‘fleeting permanence’ that is familiar to so many musicians – that altered perception of time passing that is part of successful music performance (in concert or in rehearsal) (Custodero, 2010). All of these evocative, poetic phrases help to convey elements of my aesthetic experience in playing drum kit. It is immersive, submersive, consuming and continues only as long as I, with the musicians around me, keep creating the sound as I feel it and as I feel myself feeling it.20

Joy These days I really only play drum kit when I am reasonably confident it will bring me joy. Otherwise, why go to the trouble?! I acknowledge that this feels in some ways demonstrative of tremendous privilege – after all, how fortunate I am to make music that I like, rather than needing to play drum kit to make a living and therefore having less choice over what music I make. I am grateful for this, but it has also been an iterative process of conscious and unconscious choice to bring me closer to eudaimonia through drumming, trying always to play at the magical nexus. As Boyce-Tillman (2011: 40) points out, ‘within 20

When Ian Paice performs in concerts with Deep Purple, he plays with a 10,000-watt rig behind him, cranked up loudly so he can feel the guitars and bass in his body (Smith, 2013). Most drummers do not have the luxury of a stage setup that includes quite such epic sound monitoring, but the principle remains – of wanting, needing, not only to hear but also to feel the sounds of others in the band in order to execute one’s job not only for but also in response to (i.e., very much with) the other musicians in the rock band. This recalls the aforementioned cocoon of sound to which Gracyk (1996) alludes and that I love to create in rehearsal scenarios (not usually being granted the satisfaction of such an experience when performing or recording).

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Western society it is still a basic human challenge to keep body, mind and soul together, and . . . musicking offers immense possibilities here’. Hear, hear! Moreover, playing drum kit affords me opportunities for the impression and expression of great joy. From the outset, my collaboration with Martin Urbach in summer 2019 was largely about establishing and revelling in a shared expression of joy, central to our respective and shared senses of self and purpose, captured in these excerpts from our post-recording conversation: Martin: Gareth:

[making music is about] remembering . . . what are the things that make you feel alive inside, and reproducing that. When it’s good, it’s REALLY good . . . the better you get, the better it gets . . . the love and the joy and the hard work, that’s where the joy is, I think – that pursuit.

Jazz drummer Brian Blade observes how ‘everybody wants to be lifted up in their lives, in their experiences . . . It’s great to find that balance between, okay, am I serving the situations, and am I giving what’s needed, and am I introducing something that feeds the fire of it?’ Martin and I reflected on our mutual uplift and the cathartic release that was so rewarding and wholesome:

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Gareth:

Martin:

Gareth: Martin: Gareth:

I feel drumming is my meditation . . . when I feel whole again afterwards . . . [it can] centre everything, make me a better person, give me patience, calm me down, give me perspective, allow me to breathe again . . . recalibrate everything. Yep, yep . . . it’s ok to not get other things done as long as you’re playing music and you’re having fun and you’re healing from the inside. Everything else gets better because you did this thing Most of us, everything can wait, nothing is so urgent You can’t rationalise it [spending a whole Saturday playing drums in a recording studio in Manhattan], there’s no logical reason to do it . . . you do have to do it!

We both strongly empathised with jazz drummer Billy Hart’s description of how drumming ‘has always been a tremendous release’ (Hart, quoted in Philip, 2013: 124), a perspective reinforced by Boyce-Tillman (2011) when she notes, how ‘music has profound effects on balancing relaxation and excitement’ (247). Although in this instance Boyce-Tillman was referring to religious choral music, her point rings very true in the context of the music I like to make at the drum kit as well.

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In playing drum kit with all my various collaborators, I feel and often express deep gratitude. While I understand about what I am grateful, I am usually unsure about to whom I should direct my gratitude, but as de Botton (2012) points out, one does not need a target for one’s gratitude in order to feel it deep down and express it with abundance. Compte-Sponville (2001) similarly affirms that ‘gratitude essentially is . . . joy itself’ (136). The philosopher goes on to suggest that ‘gratitude, then, is the secret of friendship, not because we feel indebted to our friends since we owe them nothing, but because we share with them an overabundance of common, reciprocal joy’ (Compte-Sponville, 2001: 139). In creating the recordings in summer of 2020 with Stephen, I was expressing reciprocated love for my close friend, saying ‘I love you, man’. This expression took the form of abundant joy in my drumming. I loved leaning in to the idiosyncrasies of Stephen’s playing in each song. For instance, the choruses in ‘Delia Flower’ (Wheel, 2020e) are about 10 bpm slower than the verses, and I loved nestling into his guitar playing and transitioning between sections in such a way that it sounded natural and organic.

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Audio track: Delia Flower (Wheel, 2020e) When practising, I closed my eyes and imagined him there with me, playing guitar. Along with my love for Stephen, I also expressed gratitude and joy at making this great music with a person who means so much to me. Playing drum kit is for me the greatest location and expression of joy. That joy derives from the combination of elements comprising the magical nexus – Materials, Construction, Values and Expression. My learned facility, competence and understanding of operating in and across these domains affords me the deepest fulfilment in correspondence with my instrument, the environment, my collaborators, each musical moment and the culture that sustains us. At the magical nexus, joy awaits – sometimes momentary and fleeting, and always also rooted in a lifetime’s dedication to practising, and in a compulsion to practise, my art. Here is flourishing, thriving, eudaimonia.

6 In Closing (Button) In musical theatre, the ‘button’ is the short note the band all plays together at the very end of a song; there’s always one at the end of the show. Depending on context, who was listening and how, and to what extent they feel they understood what just happened, a button might be followed by rapturous applause, stunned silence or something in between. Along with the house lights coming back on and the curtain falling back on to the stage, the closing button’s primary function is to

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tell the audience it’s over and that now they are free to decompress and let their minds and bodies figure out what they just consumed. In the spirit of playing one final note (although this section is perhaps more akin to a final phrase) and letting you, the reader, go, I will keep this as short as I can. I could have titled this section ‘conclusions’, but I have drawn relatively few of those and I am sure that when the curtain rises again tomorrow I will have mostly more questions and different answers from those in this text. Per Ingold’s (2021) notion of correspondences, this work is a process, it is open-ended and it is dialogical.

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Drumming, Music and Correspondence Rather than being merely a navel-gazing exercise, I hope this Element might prove relevant and useful inasmuch as I attempted herein to position enjoyment, eudaimonia and transcendence (back) at the heart of an understanding of how making music matters. I hope, therefore, that this Element may shed light on or open conceptual doors to framing and understanding the experience and knowledge of others. I would be happy if the primary value of this short treatise lies in leading towards ‘greater attention [being paid] to the concept of aesthetic experience . . . reminding us of what is worth seeking in art and elsewhere in life’ (Shusterman, 2008: 34). Winter explains the significance of looking, sensing, outwards from the self, urging, ‘the transcendent is not out there, but within each of us – in our capacity to experience the depths of our awareness of our own selves and the form of our empathetic connectedness with the selves of others – our inter-subjectivity’ (Winter, 2013: 115). This is akin to what Ingold (2021) terms ‘correspondence’, and in a world becoming increasingly divided and divisive as diverse mainstream media constantly reinforce messages of consumerism, individualism and isolationism at the expense of experience, society and community, rarely has this perspective been more pertinent (Apple, 2012; Giroux, 2014; Hewison, 2014). Ingold’s (2021) notion of correspondences is a rich and timely framework, highly pertinent to a philosophy of playing drum kit. To recap, Ingold tells us that correspondences are processes. This means that they take time. This Element, for instance, took me fifteen years to write. It represents correspondences with my life and my musical practice, as well as with other literature pertaining to playing drum kit, making music, philosophising about music and autoethnography. This text is the product of many years of correspondence between me and various musical idioms including rock, theatre, singersongwriter and jazz; between me and the musicians whom I have come to know, usually much more intimately in music than in other details of our

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lives. I have dedicated myself to playing music that I like to play, with people with whom I like to play it. With each artist, band and project there have been rich, intense process of learning, listening, refining, practising and performing. These processes sometimes lead to divergent paths, and I deeply miss making music with, among others, Gillian Glover, Doug Grannell, Hannah Boothby, Daniel Spiller, Leo’s Garden and V1. Stephen Wheel and I continue to write and record music together after first doing so twenty-four years ago. We talk, we write, we play, we record, we listen, sometimes we perform. With my current band, BLB, we are a little over a year into playing music together, and our musicking is a constantly evolving, creative process to which we see no end in sight (Smith, in press). This brings us to Ingold’s second point about correspondences: they are openended. This means they require a depth of commitment. Correspondences are therefore richer than transactions. Correspondences are necessarily slow; they may at times move energetically, but they are never over quickly as they are entered into for the long haul. My musicking correspondence with Martin Urbach is demonstrably open-ended, both in terms of the improvised music that we make together, with no planned durations or endings, and in terms of our musical relationship. We are in no hurry at all. It took us four months from our first in-person meeting to set up drums and play together. It was another two years and four days before we did it again – this time on the sandy beach of Coney Island, New York, at sunrise. We again played duets with no planned duration and no finish line in sight (except the four-hour parking meter I’d paid for and the fact we grew very hungry so feasted on breakfast burritos). The third characteristic of Ingold’s correspondences is that they are dialogic. Dialogue in music making happens in milliseconds between musicians as we responded to the sounds we make in intense, immersive moments of collaborative improvisation, performance and rehearsal, and in personal practice. For me, the heightened awareness of dialogue in real time while making music with Stephen Wheel, Martin Urbach or BLB music can be electrifying. My asynchronous dialogical correspondence with The New Titans was thrilling as well. I am constantly in dialogue with my instrument and with the spaces – real and virtual – in which I make music. Musicians are constantly in dialogue with traditions; we correspond respectfully, seriously, humorously, lightheartedly, sincerely and emotionally with the musics, musicians and environments in which we play. As a drummer I am constantly in dialogue with myself too: What cymbals should I set up for this recording? What groove best sets off the bass part I’m hearing in this new song? How can I give the vocal more room? How does this music feel?

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I agree with Ellen Dissanayake, who tells us that experience and knowledge in art have:

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The power to grasp us utterly and transport us from ordinary sweating, flailing, imperfect ‘reality’ to an indescribable realm where we know and seem known by the sensibility of another, united in a continuing present, our usual isolation momentarily effaced. And in such states, we recognize that this is the reality, and ordinary reality is only an illusion. (Dissanayake, 2000: 4)

The world needs more art. This, indeed, is why I keep playing drum kit. I concur with Wolf’s assertion that paying attention to meaningfulness, ‘may help us to better understand our values and ourselves and may enable us to better assess the role that some central interests and activities play in our lives’ (2009: 49). While I was never in any doubt about the centrality of playing drum kit to my sense of self and purpose in life, undertaking this analysis of how drumming is meaningful to me has highlighted the particularity of contexts and conditions required for magic to be achieved. I have included details of frustrations and setbacks that inhibited my experience of playing drum kit reaching the magical nexus. The meaningfulness I experienced was not contingent on everything going well, though; meaningfulness resided in the process – in doing, being and learning. In the words of my friend and colleague, Christopher Cayari, ‘drumming is what gives [me] life!’ Another, Christopher, Chris Bird, the first person with whom I formed a band back in 1990 – first a duet, later a trio and eventually a rock five-piece – once counselled me regarding life choices, to remember that ‘you ARE drums!’ This was sage advice. Through drumming, I find meaning. As music education sociologist, Lucy Green (1988/2008), has said, issues of how meaning is made and what meanings are valued in spaces of music making and learning are critical to how people see themselves and value themselves and their culture in the world. It is therefore important to understand the music-making experiences of music makers, and how these bring about meaning. However, as Tawnya D Smith (2021) laments, ‘most of us go through life enjoying the performing arts and connecting with them in our own ways, oblivious to the experiences of the artists themselves’ (para. 9). I argue, then, that it is vital for artists to acknowledge and explain the ways in which we find and derive meaning. I play drums because of internal or 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’ (Schmid, 2011: 4). 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

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experiences, including feelings of rightness and centeredness in one’s actions, identity, strength of purpose, and competence’ (2013: 6). Drumming holds this key to my identity realisation (Smith, 2013). 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 [sic] alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning’ (Frankel, 1959: 121). 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 (2012) 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. As I have already said, I am a proud and true musical amateur.

How to get to the Magical Nexus This Element is an account of me trying to interpret my experience playing drum kit. Norman Denzin (2014) notes how ‘interpretive researchers attempt to secure self and personal experience stories that deal with events – mundane and remarkable – that have effects at the deep level of a person’s life’ (43). The experiences described and analysed herein were, I believe both remarkable and mundane. They were mundane inasmuch as a middle-aged man playing drums in dozens of part-time rock bands, of which no one has ever heard, is part of life’s social-sonic wallpaper. They were remarkable because of their deep and residual meaningfulness to me. For instance, in spring 2020 I was between jobs and health insurance policies, struggling, as many people were, to understand and respond to what the Covid-19 pandemic meant for me, my family and our futures (Roulston, 2020; CabedoMas et al., 2021; Walzer, 2021). I was dealing with depression, anxiety and

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uncertainty; and the focused, intense, music-making experiences in which I was incredibly fortunate to engage during that period were nothing less than my salvation. I recently gave a conference keynote, 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. 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. BoyceTillman (2020) proposes that ‘part of self-actualization within a musical experience can be seen as the last remaining place for the soul in Western society’ (10). Drumming, then, is where my soul resides. It is where I merge with magic. Playing drum kit holds the key for me to reach the magical nexus.

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Correspondence and the Magical Nexus Through diligent, committed correspondence (Ingold, 2021) with and within the musical elements of Materials, Construction, Values and Expression (Boyce-Tillman, 2011, 2020), one can reach the magical nexus. Sometimes this may require a great deal of conscious effort – for instance, to quieten distractions, to be fully present, to stop thinking or worrying or just to listen in. At other times, it may require no effort at all. In any event, I would advise against trying explicitly to reach the magical nexus; this would be a fool’s errand since the path to it is necessarily, qualitatively, subtly or surprisingly different each time. The key is correspondence. This is what my mentor, Pete Fairclough had in mind when he urged that the only think I should do consciously on stage, is listen. Before getting to the stage (or into the rehearsal room, practice space, recording studio or wherever one is about to make music), however, we need to give ourselves permission – permission to devote ourselves fully to the present, to the music, to the moment. ‘Permission’ was another of Pete Fairclough’s favourite words – he used it to mean freeing oneself to enter the music as being fully oneself. Pete put out an album in 1997 titled Permission, and I (with his permission) have borrowed the title for an album I am slowly making, titled Permission Granted. It will be the first time I have ever produced an album on entirely my own terms; I finally gave myself permission to be the musician I want to be, and that, in this instance, means recording all manner of duets. I am in the midst of a long correspondence with the album, committing to a lengthy

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process – of finding the right collaborators, sounds, settings and spaces; this correspondence is open-ended, because although the album will one day be completed, that will not really be the end of the process (the album is itself really part of bigger, longer musical-existential correspondence); it is thoroughly and deeply dialogical – this is why the album contains only duets; conversing with one other person at a time, I can really, truly, deeply attend to our discourse. So do not shoot for the magical nexus. Aim, rather, to be fully present. Grant yourself permission – and make music with others who grant you that same permission – to speak, sing and play your music, your voice, your self. Take your time and be unhurried. Listen. Devote yourself to diligent correspondence through music, and the magic will take care of itself.

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Acknowledgements

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Dad: This is the main thing Pam: Is this is closer to what you thought I was trying to do? Liz: Thank you for the space to think, write and play drums

Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice Simon Zagorski-Thomas London College of Music, University of West London Simon Zagorski-Thomas is a Professor at the London College of Music (University of West London, UK) and founded and runs the 21st Century Music Practice Research Network. He is series editor for the Cambridge Elements series and Bloomsbury book series on 21st Century Music Practice. He is ex-chairman and co-founder of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. He is a composer, sound engineer and producer and is, currently, writing a monograph on practical musicology. His books include Musicology of Record Production (2014; winner of the 2015 IASPM Book Prize), The Art of Record Production: an Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field co-edited with Simon Frith (2012), the Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production co-edited with Andrew Bourbon (2020) and the Art of Record Production: Creative Practice in the Studio co-edited with Katia Isakoff, Serge Lacasse and Sophie Stévance (2020).

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About the Series Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice has developed out of the 21st Century Music Practice Research Network, which currently has around 250 members in 30 countries and is dedicated to the study of what Christopher Small termed musicking – the process of making and sharing music rather than the output itself. Obviously this exists at the intersection of ethnomusicology, performance studies, and practice pedagogy / practice-led-research in composition, performance, recording, production, musical theatre, music for screen and other forms of multi-media musicking. The generic nature of the term ‘21st Century Music Practice’ reflects the aim of the series to bring together all forms of music into a larger discussion of current practice and to provide a platform for research about any musical tradition or style. It embraces everything from hip-hop to historically informed performance and K-pop to Inuk throat singing.

Elements in Twenty-First Century Music Practice Elements in the Series The Marks of a Maestro: Annotating Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony Raymond Holden and Stephen Mould Chinese Street Music: Complicating Musical Community Samuel Horlor Reimagine to Revitalise: New Approaches to Performance Practices Across Cultures Charulatha Mani A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit: Magical Nexus Gareth Dylan Smith

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A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/emup