In March 2000, Gasser was hired by Savage Beast Technologies (today
Pandora Media, Inc.), where he helped flesh out the
Music Genome Project. Gasser became the Chief Musicologist at Pandora, and is the architect of all five Music Genomes (Pop/Rock, Jazz, Hip-hop/Electronica; World Music; Classical); he also helped design the means of analysis and training by which the company continues to this day, as the hugely successful Pandora Radio service. In April 2003, Gasser became the Artistic Director of the Classical Archives website, which in May 2009 re-launched as a streaming and download service with classical content from most labels. Gasser designed for the site a proprietary database to properly categorize and display classical recordings, and runs the editorial operation – including conducting interviews with classical artists and composers such as
Renée Fleming,
Hilary Hahn,
Alan Gilbert,
Hélène Grimaud,
Vladimir Ashkenazy,
Jeremy Denk,
Daniel Hope,
David Lang,
Eric Whitacre, and
John Corigliano. Gasser is active as a pianist and bandleader, especially in jazz and popular styles – including with the San Francisco Jazz Quartet;. He is an occasional adjunct professor in Medieval-Renaissance music history at
Stanford University. He periodically gives lectures, such as at the
Carmel Authors and Ideas Festival in 2010, at the
University of California, Santa Barbara in February 2011, and at a joint meeting of the
National Endowment for the Arts and the
United States Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., regarding arts education.
Composition Gasser's shift in focus to musicology, beginning in 1991, led to an extended disruption in his compositional output, with only a handful of works written before his graduation from Stanford in 2001. Since 2003, however, composition has become a principal focus of his career. Among his substantial works include
American Festivals – a four-movement work with poetry by
Robert Trent Jones Jr.; each movement is dedicated to a distinct and quintessential American holiday: "Oration on July 4th" (2004), "Black Suite Blues" (for Martin Luther King Jr. Day; 2005); "Memorial Day" (2006); and "Thanksgiving" (2007). The work has been performed – in part and whole – numerous times by several orchestras (e.g.,
Charleston, Memphis, Arkansas, and
Oakland East Bay Symphonies), including a complete performance at the 2008 IMG Festival del sole (Napa Valley, CA.). the live premiere took place on November 2, 2009, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and the work was released on the ABQ's 50th Anniversary CD on Summit Records. The same Kennedy Center concert also saw the premiere of the second Fermi-related work, the narrated symphony
Cosmic Reflection, with narration by Pierre Schwob and physicist
Lawrence Krauss that tells the full history of the
Universe. The work was recorded by the
Baltimore Symphony under
Marin Alsop, and will be subsequently released as a full-feature DVD. Among other serious works include his
World Cello for Cello and Orchestra (2008), which was premiered by cellist
Maya Beiser and the Oakland East Bay Symphony under
Michael Morgan, along with three "world" soloists:
Jiebing Chen,
erhu; Aruna Narayan,
sarangi; and Bassam Saba,
oud. His
3 Jazz Preludes (2007) were performed at Carnegie Hall by pianist Kimball Gallagher in March 2008. His opera
The Secret Garden, commissioned by the
San Francisco Opera, premiered on 1 March 2013; the opera was also performed at Opera Theater of Weston (Vermont) in January 2015. Gasser wrote the opening movement of the choral song cycle ''Tyler's Suite'', about the tragic story of Tyler Clementi (with other movements by
Stephen Schwartz,
John Corigliano, and
Jake Heggie, among others), which was premiered in March 2014 by the
San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and which will be performed subsequently in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York. His song cycle
Repast: An Oratorio, about the life and career of civil rights figure Booker Wright, with text by
Kevin Young, will be premiered on October 26, 2014, by bass-baritone Justin Hopkins at the
Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi
Publications Gasser's book,
Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste (
Macmillan Publishing) was released on April 30, 2019. == Personal life ==