Neil Peart scholarship | Celeste Fox wins

Some drumming news is a spec sheet. This one is just nice.

Modern Drummer, Universal Music Enterprises and Neil Peart’s family have named Celeste Fox the winner of the 2026 Neil Peart Spirit of Drumming Scholarship — one drummer, picked from a global field of applicants.

And this year, the prize includes tickets to see Rush.

Why the judges picked her

The people reading the applications include Carrie Peart, trustee of Neil’s estate, and his daughter Olivia Peart. So this is not a magazine handing out an award with a famous name attached to it. It is his family choosing.

Two things stood out to them. The first was Fox’s performance video — a rendition of a John Bonham drum solo, which is a bold thing to put in front of that particular panel. The second was how well she understood Peart himself: not only the parts, but the thinking underneath them.

That second one is really the whole point of the award. Every applicant submits a video and a personal essay on how Peart’s playing and philosophy shaped their own musical journey. You can get through the video on chops alone. The essay you cannot.

What she actually wins

A year of being taken seriously, essentially:

• One full year of private instruction with Rob Silverman, Modern Drummer’s Director of Worldwide Education
• An All-Access Modern Drummer subscription
• Exclusive Rush box sets from UMe
• Four tickets to a Rush “Fifty Something” show

The tickets are new this year, and they are a lovely bit of circularity. Rush are back on the road for the first time since Peart died, with Anika Nilles playing his parts to sold-out arenas — and the reviews say she has cleared it. So a scholarship set up to honour one drummer now sends its winner to watch another one carry the same music forward. Four seats, so she can take people. Nice touch.

Where the scholarship came from

Modern Drummer, UMe and the Peart family established it after Neil’s death in 2020, to put something practical behind the tributes.

Fox is the fourth recipient. Maxx Rinkus took the first one — a Texas high-schooler who won 52 weeks of lessons with the late Dom Famularo — followed by Aimee Peckham and, last year, Steven Malek.

Final thoughts

There is no shortage of ways to memorialise a drummer. Most of them involve a statue, a tribute album or a very long YouTube comment section.

Paying for a year of somebody’s lessons is better than all of them. Congratulations to Celeste Fox.

If you want to hear why this award exists at all, Peart’s kits era by era are in the Rig Vault — and the Tom Sawyer page breaks down the fills that made a generation buy too many cymbals.

Sources: Modern Drummer and the scholarship’s own page.