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.

It is hardly surprising that the long tradition of partimento schemata is apparent in the music of Beethoven. Many of his teachers, including Haydn and Salieri, were raised in that pedagogic tradition, and the musical patterns surface consistently in Beethoven’s output. They are particularly evident in works that focus on the performer, such as concertos and fantasias, but their grammatical and syntactical features also contribute to the rarefied language of the late quartets.