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Nolan Gasser, the chief musicologist for Pandora radio, sits at a piano. Gasser will hold a discussion in Kansas City, Mo., during Middle of the Man fest.
Q&A with chief musicologist for Pandora Radio
► OMAR SANCHEZ
@OhMySanchez
A renowned music composer and chief musicologist for Pandora Radio Nolan Gasser has recently been raising awareness on the power of music and the potential for further research.
Gasser has made appearances on ESPN's FiveThirtyEight series "The Collectors," along with a TEDx talk that delves into the benefits of knowing why we connect so much to music.
On Tuesday, Gasser will continue to engage in this discourse when he comes from his home in Sonoma County, California to speak at the Kansas City Public Library on the topics he's devoted his life to.
Gasser's appearance is part of the this year's "Ideas" lineup during the Middle of the Map Fest, a Kansas City festival that features a week-long tribute to art in a multitude of avenues.
Before stopping by, Gas-
ser spoke to the Kansan about why one grows to liking specific types of music, how the knowledge of music can be therapeutic and his thoughts on why our culture has such an attachment to artists such as the late pop sensation, Prince.
University Daily Kan-
san: Would it be safe to say that what you're doing with music right now is almost in the echelon of the Human Genome Project with genetics or Charles Darwin with evolution? You're structuring something that people normally didn't think could be organized.
Nolan Gasser: Well it's kind of you to make such lofty comparisons. There's no doubt that there is some kinship.
When Pandora first started back around 2000, it wasn't called Pandora, it was called Savage Beast Technologies. And of course this was an era before iTunes, and we really thought that we were going to license the technology of
the Music Genome Project rather than offer it directly to consumers as Pandora does today. The Musie Genome Project was come up within part, as an actual model for how the original founders thought we would construct this way of being able to make smart recommendations.
But certainly when I came on board right at the beginning, I actually took that metaphor very seriously. I sort of did my own research into the actual Human Genome Project, genetics, species organizations, genotypes and phenotypes and things like that. And it really gave me I think a good platform and framework in which to work.
It's clearly a metaphor. We're not turning music genres into biological species. But what it enabled me to do was to look at these large scale music genres like pop and rock or jazz or classical or world and think about them almost as if they were a species. *
So, if we could devise
what those individual genes were, it would allow us not only to get a snapshot of what those songs and works were as a whole, but then make these smart recommendations and actual comparisons.
UDK: While you've been going around spreading the word about your work, why do you think it's important for the audience to hear the extent of that work?
NG: I think there's a lot that we don't understand, especially the average person who's not musically trained. We kind of take it for granted, "Yeah, I love music." Well, so what?
So I think 'a talk like mine, I don't have all the answers, but to have that conversation — what are those fundamental elements that give rise to music's power in our lives — that can only be something that can be hopefully interesting.
Even more important, it can be sort of actionable. People can say "I can take more power in my music
listening and discovery and I can use music as a greater force of positivity and sustenance in my life than I maybe do." Hopefully to empower that natural drive to love music.
UDK: What gives you that urge to discover more about music?
NG: I once had a professor that I told him that I wanted to study Renaissance music and his answer was, "Well welcome to the bottomless pit." And that could be said about almost any genre, even more recent genres like electronica and hip-hop — there's no end to the level of depth that you can get.
There's a couple of small windows into that. One would be this sort of reverence we've had for Prince. One of the things that's been talked about is what a great musician he was. That may seem kind of casual, but I'm very attuned to how the media talks about musicians, and often times they talk much more about
the cultural aspect, or their lyrics or the quality of their voice.
As great as he was, there was a lot of things he didn't do, or areas he didn't touch — not to say that he couldn't had he put his energy there — but unless you're Bach maybe or Beethoven, you're only kind of scratching the surface of possibilities.
So for me, whether as a composer or as a music historian, as much time as I spend, I just keep getting reminded how little I know, and how much more there is and even if I had another 100 years to work on my book I still wouldn't say everything.
Nolan Gasser's discussion will start at 7:15 p.m. at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library. Tickets are $25. More information is available at middleofthemapfest.com.
- Edited by Shane Jackson
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