Nolan Gasser doesn&rsquo;t really believe in labels. </p><p>Never has. </p><p>Classical, jazz, rock &mdash; all are branches of the same tree in his view. </p><p>The internationally recognized composer and chief architect of an innovative Web-based music program called Pandora will deliver a talk about musical styles and how they relate at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at the Folly Theater, in a program presented by the Friends of Chamber Music. </p><p>In a recent interview, Gasser said that his eclectic taste in music began when he was quite young. It all started when he landed his first gig at the age of 11, five years after he began piano lessons. </p><p>He was at a shopping mall in his hometown of La Mirada, Calif. (not far from Disneyland), and a friend dared him to play a piano in the food court. </p><p>&ldquo;The next thing I knew, I had a job playing Fridays and Saturdays in the late afternoons there in the food court,&rdquo; Gasser said. &ldquo;I did that for a good four or five years. And it was a great breeding ground for being an eclectic, curious musician. I&rsquo;d have people say, &lsquo;Hey, can you play the Beatles? Can you play Scott Joplin? Can you play &ldquo;Sound of Music&rdquo;? Can you play Mozart?&rsquo; So for me, it seemed normal that if you wanted to be a musician, you had to play it all.&rdquo;</p><p>He continued studying classical piano, but he also played with a Dixieland band in his teens. He has been mixing it up ever since. He said his musical identity rested on three pillars &mdash; classical, jazz and pop. </p><p>&ldquo;I thought it was normal, but it was only as I got older and started meeting other musicians that I found that it was not so typical, especially for a classical musician, to be able to improvise on a Monk tune or to be able to play in a blues jam session or &lsquo;Stairway to Heaven,&rsquo;&ensp;&rdquo; he said.</p><p>There were times during his musical education that his teachers worried that pop music and jazz might be &ldquo;infecting&rdquo; his classical sensibility. Sometimes, it went the other way. An instructor in a film-scoring course once told him he had too much classical training. </p><p>Ultimately, Gasser came to believe that all musical forms were interrelated. </p><p>&ldquo;Kids are just more open and more curious and see things in an integrated fashion,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just music. It really is just a combination of harmonies and melodies and rhythms organized in ways that are not necessarily that divergent. &hellip; If you look at the history of jazz, it didn&rsquo;t just come out of nowhere. The western musical canon was there as part of its soil. People like Scott Joplin, who in addition to knowing all of the march music and hearing the Creole songs and the interesting kinds of syncopation that came from the African experience, also knew Chopin.&rdquo;</p><p>Stride pianist James P. Johnson composed symphonies, Gasser pointed out, and George Gershwin wrote suites in addition to Broadway musicals and Tin Pan Alley songs. </p><p>&ldquo;It is true that people tend to put things in boxes, which is one of the things that Pandora has tried to get away from as well,&rdquo; he said. </p><p>Pandora.com, founded in 2000 by composer Tim Westergren, is a new way to listen to music. Membership is free, and users can create their own &ldquo;radio stations&rdquo; to hear styles of music they like. The database includes hundreds of thousands of selections, including pop, jazz and, most recently, classical.</p><p>&ldquo;He was a practicing musician and finding frustration in the industry that came out of this whole notion of putting things in boxes,&rdquo; Gasser said. &ldquo;He thought maybe if we could combine some ways of categorizing and analyzing music &hellip; he might be able to provide people access to music that they otherwise wouldn&rsquo;t know about, which would be good for music fans as well as for the artists themselves.&rdquo;