1/22/2024 0 Comments Logo pop music![]() He and his classmates spent hours analyzing a symphony by Beethoven, but such effort was mostly absent for music by contemporary artists, at Sac State or anywhere else. Something else he learned, however, was that a massive wall existed between classical and popular music. “That was definitely encouraging to hear.” “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. The small Music Composition program, he said, allowed him to develop strong one-on-one relationships with professors and a sense of camaraderie with fellow students. With that deception behind him, however, he focused on getting up to speed, spending most of his days in Capistrano Hall. Then, during his audition, he set out the pages and proceeded to perform the piece from memory to create the false impression he knew how to read music. … There was just a huge learning curve.”Ĭuchna employed a bit of trickery to get admitted, using notation software to create sheet music of a piano piece he had written himself. “I had no formal training, and everyone at the collegiate level for the most part has been schooled, educated in music at that point. “In retrospect, it was pretty naïve thinking,” Cuchna said. To get the formal education he felt he needed, he enrolled at Sac State. He had pursued music since taking up guitar when he was 13, and twice dropped out of community college to focus on his music career.īy his mid-20s, Cuchna was in a band but souring on the idea of life as a touring musician and feeling that he had reached a limit in what he could teach himself about music. The medium was new when he graduated high school. Podcasting is not something Cuchna ever envisioned himself doing. 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. Launched in 2016 and since 2018 produced by Spotify, “Dissect” was named the best podcast of 2018 by the New York Times and among the top 50 podcasts that same year by Time magazine and The Guardian. It’s a concept that he says can be traced directly back to his time at Sac State. That love led to an unlikely career: Cuchna is the host of “ Dissect,” a podcast that spends each season analyzing a single album of popular music, song by song, line by line, and note by note. ![]() “I really fell in love with the research process.” Cole Cuchna has channeled his Music Theory degree and his love for research into "Dissect," a podcast that analyzes an album of pop music one song at a time. “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. “What I fell in love with, unpredictably, was writing about music,” Cuchna said. When Cole Cuchna ’15 (Theory/Composition) was a Sacramento State student studying music theory, he learned something about himself that would prove life changing.
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