Not directly about drumming, but kind of interesting. In the interest of fairness to their site, I haven?t posted the whole article. See the rest at:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2112794/

From Slate
How To Speak Music
A Juilliard professor teaches me to play the piano like a child.
By Eric Liu


Robert Abramson teaches eurhythmics and improvisation at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. That's his official job description. But really, what he teaches is feel. Bob deprograms his highly trained, technically perfect musicians and reminds them how to feel the music again: in the fingers, in the feet, in the solar plexus and the back of the neck. And sometimes he takes amateurs like me and makes us realize we have more music inside us than we know.

SNIP

Today, however, the teaching of music?even at the great conservatories?is often a more mechanical affair. The problem, Abramson says, lies in what these students have been taught about what matters musically?not experimentation, but repetition; not invention, but perfection. His students come to Juilliard knowing how to decode the symbols of music but not knowing how to infuse them with meaning. "We teach reading without literacy," he says.
The disease of dead ears and dull senses is not simply a musical malady, in his view. Young people well outside of Juilliard deliberately adopt a flattened affect in speech and sensibility?yeah cool whatever?and disregard the natural ups and downs of intonation in everyday life. People are forgetting how to hear.
Bob's way of reminding his students of their senses is indirect. He has me sit at the piano bench next to him, and he starts me off with some motions that seem to have nothing to do with music. He asks me to sway my arms up and down, as if I were doing "the wave" at a ballgame, and then pound my hands down on the closed wooden keyboard cover. First with the whole arm. Then just the forearm. Then wrist. Then straight fingers. Then curved fingers.
It's what he calls, "The dance of the piano." It's an unusual exercise, but I am now conscious of my whole upper body as I play. And that was the point: Bob had helped me rediscover my limbs, the sense that movement and meaning are connected; that music is the movement of sound.
Next, Bob works to develop my inner ear. He opens up the keyboard and asks me to do something deceptively simple: Say my name, and at the same time, play it on the piano. Play my name. The first time through, I realize I've never paid much attention to the sound of my name. I say, "Eric Liu" like DA-da-DAAA. But the way I bang it out on the keys sounds like da-da-da. The rhythm is robotic and all wrong. So Bob has me try again. Listen, he says in his urgent rasp. Really listen.
I do, and I try again. By and by, I learn how to hear the cadence of my own name?to feel it?and to express it with my fingertips. So now, Bob starts nudging me forward, from rhythm to intonation. He asks me to notice how "Liu" is a higher pitch than "Eric." We both sing it?E-ric Liu, E-ric Liu?and then we play it on the keys, and the idea is for me to play. The more we play, the more natural it all seems. No one is judging me for hitting the "right" notes. When I make a "mistake," like getting the rhythm slightly wrong, Bob asks me only to hear what I did wrong and to do something with it. Before long, Bob announces to me that I have learned to speak a language.

SNIP ? see rest of the article at:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2112794/