by Andrew Alonzo | aalonzo@claremont-courier.com

Back in 2020, “Renaissance kid Jacqueline Cordes” introduced Courier readers to one of The Webb Schools’ busiest students, 17-year-old Jacqueline Cordes. She was a student-athlete, pianist, learner of Chinese and American Sign Language, was writing a screenplay, was a theater hand, and a Japanese manga artist.

More than five years have since passed, and Pomona College graduate Cordes, now 22, remans just as busy, though her focus has narrowed.

“I absolutely am a Claremont music artist, but I mostly consider myself a creator of musical worlds, because that is really my goal when creating music, always,” Cordes said.

Her bio at jacquelinecordes.com described her as “composer,” “polyglot,” and “synesthete.” She’s been making music since her early youth and along with her native English, speaks Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and ASL. She is currently studying Tibetan.

Cordes was diagnosed at 8 with synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon where the triggering of one sense involuntarily triggers another. In her case, this means she sees colors when hearing music. She calls it her “mutant power,” and her compositions, “the chromaverse.”

22-year-old Claremont composer, polyglot, and synesthete Jacqueline Cordes’ sophomore album, “Frozen Star,” was released today. Courier photo/Andrew Alonzo

“I think that synesthesia definitely encourages me to really branch out especially in terms of genre or style because I want to experience these different colors and I also want to collect these different colors,” she said. “I do think that synesthesia has an effect on just kind of pushing me outside of my comfort zone in terms of music specifically.”

Cordes’s second album, “Frozen Star,” comes out today on streaming services and at jacquelinecordes.bandcamp.com. She calls it “my most colorful album yet.” It follows her 2024 debut album, “Singularity.”

“‘Singularity’ basically was a journey from past to future. It was kind of a journey across time. And ‘Frozen Star’ is a journey across color,” Cordes said. “I think of them as two halves of a double album because some tracks were going to originally go on ‘Singularity,’ and then I held them back because I was still working on them. So, this is kind of completes the set.”

“Illusions of Amethyst,” the first single from “Frozen Star,” is out now, as is a video, “The Puppetmaker,” which Cordes made with Runway AI, an artificial intelligence platform. Though she plans on using AI to create more videos, she stressed that AI does not play a role in the music she makes.

The young artist described her sound as “neoclassical.”

“When I’m choosing genres, I also sometimes say, like soundtrack, sometimes new age,” she said, “but I do think that when I’m writing music, each track really is supposed to be its own thing. So it is always difficult for me to choose one genre, but neoclassical is a pretty good guess.”

Soon Cordes’s will have her first soundtrack credit for work she did on a short film, “Three Angles.” It will be her first commercially available soundtrack.

So far, 2025 rivals 2020 in activity. In January she co-headlined a benefit concert at Claremont United Church of Christ that raised $10,000 for the church’s capital campaign. She graduated from Pomona College in June with a bachelor’s degree in music with a minor in Japanese. She’s featured on the “Why Music” tab at Pomona College’s music department webpage at pomona.edu/academics/departments/music. She recently had the opportunity to play some her music on Claremont College’s radio station, KSPC 88.7 FM. And soon, along with her father and talent manager Jay, she will co-author a research paper “How Vast Is Music? Creating “The Fibonacci Variations” With Colors And Scales” to be published in The Fibonacci Quarterly. The paper is related to her 2024 talk, “How Vast is Music? Exploring Musical Chromesthesia and the ‘Scale Space’ with the Fibonacci Sequence,” at Harvey Mudd College’s International Fibonacci Conference. It is viewable at youtube.com.

“Both that talk and my paper was to basically just show people that the world of music is not limited to major and minor because a lot of pop music created today is either in major or minor,” Cordes said. “And people seem to think that this is the only way to create music. And what I’m trying to say is there are a bunch of modes that people almost never use, and even more than that, there are a ridiculous number of scales that probably no one has ever used. There are literally hundreds of unused scales.”

Cordes devised a system called the “Jacqueline Scale ID” that catalogs scales and tells someone how to play various scales and modes.

She has also hosted in-person and virtual concert-talks which, “basically allow the audience to experience my synesthesia,” she said. “That’s where I combined teaching people about what synesthesia is and then performing live with the color representation so that the audience can experience what I’m experiencing.”

The future looks bright for Cordes, including a third album and graduate school.

Go to claremont-courier.com to read “Renaissance kid Jacqueline Cordes.” More info is at jacquelinecordes.com.