Nolan Gasser
@NolanGasser
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Composer, Musicologist, Author, Katch co-founder, Architect of Pandora Radio's Music Genome Project, with various thoughts about music, data, and taste
Petaluma, CA
Joined December 2013
Nice video promo by @DGclassics: Giovanni Gabrieli was first great Venetian composer, bridging the Renaissance and Baroque eras (teacher of Schütz). And in 1600, Venice was the cutting-edge musical capital of the Western world.
🎅 Our musical Christmas journey this advent continues in Venice with Paul McCreesh and Gabrieli's 'A Venetian Christmas'. It explores how the First Christmas Mass in St. Mark's Basilica might have been celebrated in the 1600. 🎧 → https://t.co/sfgeejBiXX
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Lo, the poor voice artist in our AI world: I recorded myself doing a VO mock-up for my PBS show trailer, gave it to @elevenlabsio, and got back a pro-sounding baritone narrator, “Josh”. I really want to hire a human, but damn…
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Remembering a dear friend Jim Salestrom (@jimbosalesbo) - singer, songwriter, great human - who left us far too soon Here singing his “Grateful for the Evening” We’re grateful for you, Jim, and will miss you. Now angels really do walk among us https://t.co/M2A25xGLQi
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The power of harmonic soundwaves… Traveling at a few hundred cycles per second (the guitar chords collectively), they can even make water bugs dance! No wonder they move us so!
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Happy to see an excited announcement from Google Deepmind’s Music AI program Lyria: https://t.co/9Krpa9QVea Anxious to check out its functionality, and see if it exceeds the bland results of their MusicLM. Will report back…
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If there were ever a supreme example of our brain’s ability to form meaning and emotion from music, this is it - for me, anyway.
#Onthisday in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and on Christmas Day, Bernstein conducted a concert in Berlin with musicians from both east and west. He changed the word “Freude” (Joy) into “Freiheit” (Freedom). The recording was titled “Ode to Freedom”. 🎧 → https://t.co/izbPATSccu
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As a co-founder (at Katch) myself, I concur with @reidhoffman’s sober, if clichė, observation. Being a founder means failure is not an option, and so the “balance sheet” matters more than “balance”. It’s even worse if you’re a founding CEO, which (thank God) I’m not.
Reid Hoffman on why the best founders don’t have work-life balance In the clip below, the founder of LinkedIn addresses the classic question on work-life balance at startups: “I actually think founders have no balance… If I ever hear a founder talking about how ‘this is how I
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Any reason to re-visit the Goldberg Variations is a welcome one. Such high praise for @VikingurMusic has gotten my attention, and the sprightly-performed clip here (the first half of Var. 1) is promising. An early birthday present, perhaps?
🤩 @VikingurMusic dreamed of recording Bach's Goldberg Variations for 25 years. Now, his dream has come true, and the album is being celebrated everywhere. 🎧 → to Víkingur Ólafsson's album "Goldberg Variations": https://t.co/lHWDlEeHOZ
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Now things really start to change! Cool new technology that helps you learn or write or draw things? Great. Cool new technology that helps you buy things? Shit howdy!
Today, OpenAI announced they are releasing the ChatGPT Store, an App Store for ChatGPT Shopify Apps: 33,000 apps, $561M of revenue App Store: 1.8M apps, $910B of revenue ChatGPT Store: 0 "agents", $0 revenue Probably millions of agents, billions revenue soon I wish I had
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Listening to the “last” Beatles tune, “Now and Then” - a gift to us Beatlemaniacs. A haunting minor-chord progression, clever form, hints of “Julia”, “Dig a Pony”, and “Because” (can you find them?). A historic curiosity, but a welcome one.
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“How lucky was I to have those men in my life” - @PaulMcCartney in this moving doc on the making of the “last” Beatles song. So cool to see the thinking, emotion, and technology behind “Now and Then”. And seeing Paul back at Capitol’s Studio A (where I also got to record 😏).
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Listening to the The Velvet Underground & Nico, their fascinating 1967 debut. Points forward, for sure, but also to their eclectic influences: Dylan, the Stones, Crumb, Shankar, etc. And with half the songs based on a I-IV harmonic pivot, also quintessentially American.
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Toccata and Fugue in D minor Night on Bald Mountain Dance macabre Symphonie fantastique Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste All good examples of “scary” music But it’s worth asking: how is the brain able to convert mere soundwaves to fear?? Boo!
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As @harari_yuval notes, nothing can be understood by embracing a single perspective Indeed, it’s not just our “job” to seek out the complexities of “reality”, it’s an inevitability if one is being intellectually or artistically honest Reality, lest we forget, is quantum
During times of conflict and suffering, we can only hope that outsiders who are not immediately affected will nurture seeds of peace. The job of intellectuals, artists and scholars is to try and go deeper. To try and see the complexity of reality, especially in today's climate of
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An astute observation by @SouthPark creator Trey Parker on why some stories work better than others: Not a series of “and then…”, but a sequence of “and therefore” or “yes, but”… to keep the audience leaning forward. The same, by the way, applies to composing good music.
Students at NYU asked the creators of South Park the million-dollar question: “What makes a good story?” They gave one of the best explanations of story I’ve heard: “If we can take the beats of your outline, and the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats… you got
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Listening to Stravinsky’s Suite italienne, for violin and piano, performed by Itzhak Perlman. Rarely is a transcription “better” than the original (the ballet Pulcinella, after Pergolesi), but to me, it’s far more potent emotionally. Musical neo-classicism at its finest!
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Listening to Bowie’s eponymous 1967 debut album. A feisty, if at times odd, vaudeville pop album, containing striking seeds of Hunky Dory - especially in its frequent harmonic audacity. Check out the Bacharach-esque “There is a Happy Land”.
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So much wonder here: The beauty of this image. The mind-numbing variety in relative scales. The astonishment that we can calculate this speed. The mystery of a future collision. The humility and gratitude we all SHOULD feel.
This Galaxy is speeding towards us at the speed of 68 miles per second (110 kilometers per second)
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How cool to have been in this elite circle of composers actively defining the sound of American art music in the mid-20th c. And how lucky are we composers today attempting to do so in the early 21st. Nothing is pre-ordained in art until after the fact.
American composer Ned Rorem was born #OTD 100 years ago! “The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that’s impossible; you just don’t meet everyone in the world.” -Leonard Bernstein in Rorem's "Paris Diary" (1966)
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