Delivered by Intellect to: Gareth Dylan Smith (33350880) IP: 68.118.230.142 On: Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:59:03 292 Chapter 17 Art Gallery Drum Kit Solos, Spirituality and Practical Musicology Gareth Dylan Smith A Practical Musicological Approach to Studying Drum Kit Solos In this chapter I explore a recent and continuing phenomenon in my life – that of play- ing solos at the drum kit (or more accurately, at an evolving array of drum kits) in the art gallery in the College of Fine Arts building where I work at Boston University (BU) in Boston, Massachusets. I discuss drumming in relation to Boyce-Tillman’s (2011, 2020) model of Spirituality and frame that discussion with Zagorski-Tomas’ (2022) Practical Musicology framework, within which he delineates various approaches to music scholarship. I illustrate in this chapter how my art gallery drumming practice aligns with two of these approaches – autoethnography and practice research. Autoethnography Tis chapter is autoethnographic (Chang 2008) inasmuch as it accounts for how I did the research I describe. Tis chapter is a ‘complex mediation and reconstruction of experience’ (Pinar et al. 1995: 567). As ‘a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context […] both a method and a text’ (Reed-Danahay 1997: 9), autoethnography is especially apropos in research in music and in particular making music, where ‘the corporeal knowledge of a musician’s body and the physical act of music-making can be at the centre of the […] enquiry and used to explore both the creative process and musical output’ (Bartleet and Ellis 2015: 10). Tis chapter com- prises me (auto) writing (graphy) about the culture (ethno) of what Sarath (2018,