Abstract
This study synthesises a range of views from cultural psychology, action theory and expert practitioners to illuminate issues of creativity and meaning in the performance of the Western kit drummer. Creativity and cultural psychology models are tested and critiqued, but require extension or adaptation to cast a more focused light on the meaning of creative performance for drummers. Aspects of the work of Csikszentmihalyi, Dewey, and Boesch are drawn together and developed to argue that the construct of ‘significant action in context’ provides the conceptual and methodological tool with which to begin analysis of this relationship of mind to cultural setting. In seeking understanding of perception rather than objectively-determined facts, a qualitative interpretivist paradigm is adopted. Semi-structured interviews and autobiographical data of expert practitioners are used to generate rich data. Viewed from an action-theoretical perspective, the data are analysed and interpreted using thematic analysis, expanded here to encompass both autoethnographic and phenomenographical components. The agency of the researcher is assumed throughout, and the importance of scholarly self-reflexivity highlighted. The purpose of the study is to construct a cultural psychology of the Western kit drummer which may reveal aspects of creativity in performance. It emerges organically from an ongoing sense of needing to know, or at least understand better, how drummers’ cultural psychology determines what they do. Such an explanation may not only contribute functionally to drummer practice, but also improve understanding of collaborative and creative interactional processes in music and related artistic spheres.