By Jonathan Morales

2023年12月6日

When Cole Cuchna ’15 (Theory/Composition) was a 萨克拉门托 State student studying music theory, he learned something about himself that would prove life changing.

“What I fell in love with, unpredictably, was writing about music,” Cuchna said. “When you take music history classes, you write a full essay on a Beethoven work or a Shostakovich symphony, and when you do that, you have to research the composer and research what was going on at that time when they wrote this piece of music. 然后分析作品本身。

“I really fell in love with the research process.”

That love led to an unlikely career: Cuchna is the host of “解剖,” a podcast that spends each season analyzing a single album of popular music, song by song, line by line, and note by note. It’s a concept that he says can be traced directly back to his time at 囊状态.

Launched in 2016 and since 2018 produced by Spotify, “解剖” was named the best podcast of 2018 by the 纽约时报 and among the top 50 podcasts that same year by 时间 magazine and 《卫报》. The show has typically examined hip-hop and R&B artists including Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Beyoncé, though Cuchna has explored music from comedian Bo Burnham and, most recently, alternative rock band Radiohead.

库奇纳从未想过自己会做播客。 当他高中毕业的时候，这种媒介还是个新事物。 他从13岁开始学吉他就开始追求音乐，并两次从社区大学退学，专注于他的音乐事业。

25岁左右的时候，库奇纳加入了一支乐队，但他已经厌倦了作为一名巡回音乐家的生活，他觉得自己在音乐方面的自学能力已经达到了极限。 为了获得他认为自己需要的正规教育，他进入了萨克州立大学。

“In retrospect, it was pretty naïve thinking,” Cuchna said. “I had no formal training, and everyone at the collegiate level for the most part has been schooled, educated in music at that point. … There was just a huge learning curve.”

库奇纳在入学时耍了一点小伎俩，他用乐谱软件为他自己写的一首钢琴曲谱曲。 然后，在试镜期间，他把乐谱摆出来，凭记忆演奏这首曲子，制造出他知道如何读谱的假象。

不过，有了这个骗局，他集中精力赶上进度，大部分时间都在卡皮斯特拉诺大厅度过。 他说，这个小型的音乐作曲课程让他与教授建立了牢固的一对一关系，并与同学们建立了同志情谊。

“I had some really great professors that gave me great feedback on essays and encouraged me, and did tell me, ‘The quality of the paper you’re writing is different,’ ” he said. “That was definitely encouraging to hear.”

然而，他还了解到，古典音乐和流行音乐之间存在着一堵巨大的墙。 他和他的同学花了几个小时分析贝多芬的交响乐，但在萨克州立大学或其他任何地方，当代艺术家的音乐几乎没有这样的努力。

School of Music Director Stephen Blumberg called Cuchna “one of my very best composition students in all of the almost 30 years I’ve been at 囊状态,” one who came to the University as a rock musician but whose skills in all aspects of classical music and theory grew tremendously during his time on campus.

Cuchna, Blumberg said, was a unique and original composer who also excelled in his other classes and “developed enormously” as a pianist. “解剖,” Blumberg said, is the perfect combination of Cuchna’s skills, interests, and expertise deployed effectively to bring meaningful insight to his audience.

“He has blazed his own trail, finding a path that truly harmonizes with his vision,” Blumberg said. “Teachers sometimes talk about how they learn from their students, and that’s true, you learn while you’re teaching. But to be able to really turn the tables and become the student learning from your former student, that’s a unique experience that is very moving, which is how I feel when I listen to episodes of ‘解剖.’ ”

库奇纳2015年毕业，开始了短暂的单飞生涯，之后成为了一名咖啡师。 但他一直渴望在古典和流行世界之间架起一座桥梁。

然后，在女儿出生的第二天，他顿悟了。 Rocking his newborn at home, he listened on his headphones to Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” released just two days earlier. 这张专辑给他留下了深刻的印象，他想更多地了解它。

“ ‘解剖’ was started for that album,” Cuchna said.

他记得自己喜欢写文章，并对音乐进行深入研究。 这与播客的日益流行相吻合，播客已经存在了十年。 他觉得这是对音频艺术进行长篇分析的完美媒介。

“Music conveys the human experience, and the output of that is different, because the circumstances of our lives are different, but if you boil it down, the essence is the same across time, across genres, across any art form, across mediums.” ——科尔·库奇纳

“解剖” launched in 2016, with 22 episodes about “To Pimp a Butterfly” that Cuchna researched, wrote, and recorded in his walk-in closet. He followed that in 2017 with a season about Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” 第二年，Spotify收购了这个节目，最终让库奇纳辞去了咖啡师的工作，全职专注于播客。

Now, with 11 seasons and three “mini seasons” under his belt, he employs a team that conducts additional research and analysis and recreates the music he is analyzing so he can break it down more easily.

然而，它仍然被记录在他的衣柜里。

Cuchna brings the entire breadth of his musical knowledge and education to “解剖.” Radiohead’s “Nude,” he explained, is simultaneously in the keys of E major and C-sharp minor, reflecting its theme of hope versus despair.

The track to Tyler, the Creator’s “I THINK” is a mashup of two Nigerian dance songs, a nod to his heritage. In “All Eyes on Me,” Bo Burnham utilizes the pentatonic scale, known for its dreamlike and hypnotic qualities, as the protagonist sings about giving into depression.

Though his personal music tastes lean toward Radiohead, for “解剖” Cuchna has primarily gravitated toward hip-hop and R&B, both because he wanted to explore their relationship to contemporary issues – much as his college essays explored the political and cultural contexts in which classical music was created – and because he felt the genres were, unfairly, not seen as serious music worth analyzing.

"There's not a lot of scholarly research on (hip-hop) or even analysis on it, which to me does a disservice to the genre,” he says on 萨克拉门托 State’s “Made at 囊状态” podcast. “Part of why I've done hip-hop a lot on the show is exactly for that reason, to hopefully start conversations about this music that people are actually listening to that is also great and really speaks to this moment in history."

在许多方面，库奇纳从他在萨克州立大学的学生时代回到了原点。 每一集本质上都是一篇经过充分研究的文章，大声朗读，不过现在加入了音乐片段、对艺术家的采访和其他音频材料。

That “解剖” is a success also means he has contributed in a significant way toward his goal of bridging the gap between classical and popular music.

“Great music is great music to me,” Cuchna said. “Music conveys the human experience, and the output of that is different, because the circumstances of our lives are different, but if you boil it down, the essence is the same across time, across genres, across any art form, across mediums.”