Book excerpt: The Ancient Art of Modern Drumming is a coffee table book for people who keep a practice pad and a pair of drumsticks at their coffee table. It is a snare drum method book interwoven with a historical context of how the American snare drum style originated and evolved. Contained within, the curious drummer will find many practical skills-building exercises and etudes accompanied by thorough narrative explanations of techniques and their theory. This book results from a lifetime of drumming combined with a keen interest in history and in-depth research of source documents dating back to the Revolutionary War.