“Nolan Gasser is a remarkably gifted composer, pianist, and arranger; he is a mass of music: classical, jazz, rock, blues… he never fails to blow my mind.”

Joel Selvin, Senior Music Critic, San Francisco Chronicle

Nolan Gasser is a critically acclaimed composer, pianist, conductor and arranger, as well as published musicologist. He received his Ph.D. in Musicology in 2001 from Stanford University, where he has been an Adjunct Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Music History. Dr. Gasser is the composer of numerous award-winning musical works, ranging in style from classical to jazz to popular, including music for the stage. His works have been performed in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Alice Tully Hall, La Salle Pleyel in Paris, and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. His four-part symphonic oratorio, American Festivals, was recently premiered in its entirety to great critical and popular success at the 2008 Festival del sole (Napa Valley, CA), organized by IMG Artists; the individual movements have been performed by several American orchestras, including the Charleston Symphony (at the Spoleto Music Festival, 2004), the Memphis Symphony (2005), the Arkansas Symphony (2006), and the Oakland Symphony (2007). His GLAST Prelude, for brass quintet, composed in celebration of NASA’s GLAST space telescope (launched June 11, 2008) and recorded by the American Brass Quintet, has also become quite a success – spawning several articles and placements on the Internet. Current compositional projects include a Cello Concerto, to be premiered by cellist Maya Beiser and the Oakland Symphony in January 2009, and a large-scale orchestral work, Cosmic Reflections, commissioned for the International GLAST Symposium, to be premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in fall 2009.

As a pianist, Dr. Gasser performs and records regularly with marquee performers as diverse as Steve Miller, John Handy, and Carol Channing. He also leads several outstanding music groups in concerts throughout the US and abroad, and appears regularly in Sonoma County, CA, in his capacity as the Music Director of Lynmar Winery (Sebastopol, CA). Within the world of Internet Music Commerce, Dr. Gasser holds two distinguished positions: first, he is the chief musical architect of the Music Genome Project, the musical technology behind the famous Pandora personalized radio application (www.pandora.com) – which now boasts over 13 million registered users. He is also the Artistic Director of the Classical Archives, (www.classicalarchives.com) the largest classical music website on the Internet – which is set for a major re-launch in August 2008. Dr. Gasser lives in the Petaluma, CA with his wife Lynn, and their two children, Camille and Preston

For a Professional C.V., download here