Drumming is often pigeonholed as solely a visceral experience. Although it is almost impossible to hide this visceral nature, it undoubtedly has cognitive components, which supports the idea of music as an embodied activity. In this essay, I analyse John Bonham’s performance on Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (1971) to demonstrate how cognitive scientist Mark Johnson’s five dimensions of the human body (biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural) can reveal meaning in drumming. By applying all five levels to the song one at a time, I peel back layers of meaning. In Johnson’s final level, I propose what I term a Tonic Beat Pattern Theory based on tension and release that serves as a method of drum analysis across rock music to explain how drummers contribute to affect and meaning. In any band, the drummer is the main driver of rhythm and groove. Drummers create musical trajectories in songs that not only make fans wiggle our hips, move our feet, and bang our heads, but also, create just about any affect the song calls for. This essay begins to uncover why rock drumming matters.

This chapter examines the role recorded music has to play in representing the drummer in the years spanning acoustic and early electric studios. Through archival research, a detailed look at what made it onto the record will help determine how – for better or worse – recordings have continually influenced generations of drummers that followed. This chapter argues that drummers in particular must be careful in how they treat early recordings that feature early drummers, especially when trying to learn from them, as above all else, early recordings have the most influence on early jazz performance today.

This chapter documents the creation, timeline, and results of the ongoing Hey Drums project. Hey Drums is a collective of female and gender minority drummers and percussionists engaged in community activities around Australia including a blog, print media, and live music events. More than 145 drummers from across the Australian continent have been interviewed on the Hey Drums site since 2016. Hey Drums has grown over this time to include live teaching and performance events for Melbourne Museum’s Nocturnal series, Melbourne Music Week, at the Espy, Testing Grounds Night Markets and the Make it up Club at Bar Open, as well as print media: in Drumscene magazine in Australia and Tom Tom Mag in the United States. All of these activities contribute to raising the profiles of the featured drummers. The initiative has been created by Nat Grant, an independent drummer, percussionist, and composer from Melbourne, Australia.

Moves with the military bands, pipes, drums and buglers to the fighting fronts. It will show the practical uses of music in the field and on board ships as an important marker for servicemen’s daily schedules. This section will also outline musicians’ roles in battle. It will show that while Bandsmen in regular infantry units often acted as stretcher bearers, those who enlisted from August 1914 and served in Territorial battalions did a great many other jobs. It will also show that the formation of bands was driven largely by the men themselves.