Ithaca College

 Peter Silberman, associate professor of music theory, was a recent guest on the podcast Track by Track, discussing his chapter “Form and Time in Trout Mask Replica” which appeared in the anthology The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis:  Expanding Approaches (2019).  

 The seminal album Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, produced and recorded by Frank Zappa in 1969, is one of the most unusual rock albums ever released, combining rock and blues with avant-garde compositional techniques more common in Modernist classical music.   In a wide-ranging conversation, Silberman and podcast host Joel Bakker discussed Silberman’s analytical ideas about this album with a focus on one song, “Bills Corpse.”  This podcast can be accessed here:

prince-track-by-track.pinecast.co/episode/a108e85d0c2143db/trout-mask-replica-track-8-bill-s-corpse

Track by Track presents one album at a time, with a different podcast for each song on the album.  There are 28 Trout Mask Replica podcasts, one for each song on what was originally a double album, each featuring a different guest.  Previous Track by Track podcasts examine albums by Prince and Stevie Wonder.