Junior Jackie Hwang has been playing and composing songs for the piano, guitar and violin since she was eight years old. Last summer, she decided that she wanted to major in music and composition at the University of California Los Angeles, Caliart or Berklee College of Music. “[They provide] more freedom and they offer commercial music,” Hwang said.

During the summer, Hwang interned at Electric & Musical Industries (EMI), a British recording company in Taiwan. Hwang became an intern through a recommendation by an acquaintance who listened to Hwang play before the summer.

“I was referred to [it] by my father’s employer’s wife who is Tina Wang, a famous professional composer in Taiwan,” Hwang said. “She did the campaign music for the president of Taiwan.”

While interning at EMI, Hwang’s main duty was to listen to all genres of music and create a 500-song playlist from one genre. Although this was a hard task, she said it helped her widen her views on music.

“I had to listen to a lot of music and even though I am very picky about songs I listen to, that task helped me broaden my musical tastes,” Hwang said.

Hwang normally listens to pop, classical and orchestra music and she recorded an album of her favorite genres of music. In the span of two years, Hwang recorded forty songs she played and put them into her album. Junior Divya Narayanan, Hwang’s friend, described Hwang’s music as relaxing and a portal to a whole new world.

“She displays a lot of emotion when she plays,” Narayanan said. “[It] makes you forget about everything else. [Her music] transports you into another world.”

Hwang plays the piano, violin and guitar. She has been playing the piano for eight years, violin for six years and guitar for two years. She also entered one competition, the Gertie Mosse scholarship, on the piano.

The Gertie Mosse scholarship was founded by Gertie Mosse, the grandmother of a Gunn orchestra student who passed away due to cancer. Competition winners play a solo at Gunn’s spring orchestra concert. Hwang won the competition last year along with two other competitors.

Hwang said she enjoys music because artists can reveal their feelings to listeners. “You take your emotion and give it to people,” Hwang said. “That’s what music is.”