As part of their debut at the Green Music Center this weekend, the Santa Rosa Symphony will also premiere Sonoma Overture, a new work by local composer Nolan Gasser. In today's report, he shares some of the creative process that went into creating it.

Nolan GasserDifferent listeners may hear many different things in his piece, says composer Nolan Gasser, but he has his own, clearly delineated sense of what the music represents.

In addition to his creative output as a composer, Gasser has also taught Medieval and Renaissance music history to undergraduate music majors at Stanford. And in a much more modern vein, he is Chief Musicologist, and the principal architect of the Music Genome Project that underlies the Pandora Internet Radio service. That, he explains, was an attempt to analzye and identify the individual characteristics within each piece of music, so that a computer algorhythm could then sequence songs by their internal similarities.