Mount Olive High School Alum is Principal Violist for American Youth Symphony

For Katie Liu, Principal Violist of the American Youth Symphony, it all started in Budd Lake. The 2016 Mount Olive High School graduate and Salutatorian attended Chester M. Stephens Elementary School, Mount Olive Middle School, and MOHS, all the while honing her musical skills, especially those of the violin.

“My musical upbringing was a little bit separate from the school district,” Liu says. “I started the violin when I was five years old and then kept playing it on the side basically since then.” However, she now plays the viola. “I was playing violin until my senior year of college. In the middle around sophomore year, that's when I decided to pick up the viola and see if I could find my way on the instrument. I didn't expect for it to stick with me this much, but it did.” For Liu, there wasn’t much difference between the two instruments. “They're similar enough that switching isn't terribly difficult. There are things you have to pick up, but isn't like completely starting new and on a clean slate.”

Katie Liu and her viola

 Liu was encouraged to study music by her dad, himself a classical music fan who had never played an instrument. “He used to be a university teacher when he was a little bit a younger, so he knew how to teach, but he didn't know music.” Liu explains. “He almost learned with me, but was able to teach me along the way. I know a lot of people get surprised that he was able to, but that's just what he did from three years when I was about age five to eight. He taught me, and then I took private lessons once a week.”

Her collegiate stop was Princeton University, where she majored in Operations Research and Financial Engineering, all the while keeping her grip on her violin. “Coming into Princeton, I sort of had the idea that I wasn't going to do music,” Liu recalls. “I never really intended on doing music ever full-time. I think I maybe entertained the thought a few times in high school, but ultimately, I also did enjoy STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) a lot when I was in high school. So going to Princeton, I knew that I wanted to do something STEM related, and my major specifically was pretty interesting to me because it was so interdisciplinary.” Liu received a certificate in Computer Science at the academics-heavy Princeton, while she juggled about six hours a week of orchestra.

At the end of her sophomore year, feeling she was plateauing a bit, she switched from violin to viola, seeking a change. “I wanted to discover something new,” Liu says. “Junior and senior year it sort of stuck, and I think I learned how to balance it more. Junior and senior year were when I started actually focusing on the instrument, and it wasn't until fall of my senior year that I decided to go into music.”

Liu recently received her Masters in Music from Colburn School in Los Angeles, and while she studied there, was named in February 2021 Principal Violist for the American Youth Symphony. “The orchestra is amazing, and I love all the people around there because not only do you go and you play, but I feel like there's always such a community you build when you have experiences like this.” And is it more pleasure or pressure being principal musician? “Definitely more pleasure, I think, because I’ve had experience leading a section. I had experience being principal in the Princeton orchestra as well as the Colburn orchestra. And, when I was a violinist, I was concertmaster in high school and throughout college. It's one of those things that the more times you do it, the more comfortable you become.”

What’s in Liu’s future? “I actually haven’t (thought about it),” Liu says. “I think a lot of people will know that I genuinely don't have a very clear sense of where I go from here. I do love music and I feel like the past few years have really aided me in both musical fulfillment and personal fulfillment in different ways than my undergraduate career, which is what I intended. And whether or not I actually continue this field as a career is not something I'm entirely sure about, also because I have so many interests. In undergrad, I was sort of doing financial engineering, and a lot of my internships were in finance or in wealth management. I've had consulting experience, and all of those have also been fulfilling. Sometimes I go through phases of so many things I want to do, and right now I'm in the process of deciding how to balance that and how to maybe not pursue everything, but also give to myself the opportunities so that I wouldn't regret not taking them.”