The Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit Cambridge Companions to Music Series

The drum kit is ubiquitous in global popular music and culture, and modern kit drumming profoundly defined the sound of twentieth-century popular music. The Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit highlights emerging scholarship on the drum kit, drummers and key debates related to the instrument and its players. Interdisciplinary in scope, this volume draws on research from across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences to showcase the drum kit, a relatively recent historical phenomenon, as a site worthy of analysis, critique, and reflection. Providing readers with an array of perspectives on the social, material, and performative dimensions of the instrument, this book will be a valuable resource for students, drum kit studies scholars, and all those who want a deeper understanding of the drum kit, drummers, and drumming.

Introduction Joseph Michael Pignato, Daniel Akira Stadnicki and Matt Brennan; I. Histories of the Drum Kit: 1. The drum kit in theory Matt Brennan; 2. Historically informed jazz performance on the drum kit Paul Archibald; 3. Toward a cultural history of the backbeat Steven Baur; 4. Historicizing a scene and sound: the case of Colombia's Música Tropical Sabanera Pedro Ojeda and Juan David Rubio Restrepo; II. Analysing the Drum Kit in Performance: 5. The drum kit beyond the anglosphere: the case of Brazil Daniel Gohn; 6. Drum kit performance in contemporary classical music Ben Reimer; 7. Theorizing complex meters and irregular grooves Scott Hanenberg; 8. Shake, rattle, and rolls: drumming and the aesthetics of Americana Daniel Akira Stadnicki; 9. Drum tracks: locating the experiences of drummers in recording studios Paul Thompson and Brett Lashua; III. Learning, Teaching, and Leading on the Drum Kit: 10. Studying hybrid and electronic drum kit technologies Bryden Stillie; 11. The aesthetics of timekeeping: creative and technical aspects of learning drum kit Carlos Xavier Rodriguez and Patrick Hernly; 12. Mentorship: jazz drumming across generations Joseph Michael Pignato; 13. Leadership: the view from behind the kit Bill Bruford; IV. Drumming Bodies, Meaning, and Identity: 14. The meaning of the drumming body Mandy Smith; 15. Disability, drumming, and the drum kit Adam Patrick Bell and Cornel Hrisca-Munn; 16. Seen but not heard: performing gender and popular feminism on drumming Instagram Vincent Andrisani and Margaret MacAulay; 17. Building inclusive drum communities: the case of hey drums Nat Grant; 18. A window into my soul: eudaimonia and autotelic drumming Gareth Dylan Smith.

Matt Brennan is Reader in Popular Music at the University of Glasgow and the author of Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (Oxford University Press, 2020). His previous book, When Genres Collide (Bloomsbury, 2017), was named as one of Pitchfork's 'Favourite Music Books of 2017.'
Joseph Michael Pignato, Professor at the State University of New York, Oneonta, is a 'musician, educator, and music business visionary' (Tape Op Magazine). He is co-author of The Music Learning Profiles Project (Routledge, 2017) and leader of the acclaimed avant jazz collective Bright Dog Red, which records for Ropeadope Records.
Daniel Akira Stadnicki has worked as a session drummer for over two decades in the Canadian folk, world, and pop music scenes; garnering Juno nominations (2000), Gold Records (2000), Canadian Folk Music Awards (2013), among other accolades. Daniel also works as a music facilitator for socially vulnerable youth in Toronto and Edmonton.