Julian La Vallee. Photo by Trent Mast
Julian La Vallee, a sophmore music major with a business concentration and business administration minor, has been waiting for the opportunity to intern at the Contemporary Music Center in Nashville, Tenn., since his junior year of high school. This fall, he’ll finally get the chance.
When La Vallee applied to Bluffton in high school, former music department chair, Peter Terry, told him about this opportunity Bluffton had connections to in Nashville after hearing about La Vallee’s vocational aspirations. Sure enough, La Vallee was interested.
“It was really appealing to me” said La Vallee. “I was like, ‘That’s sweet. That’s something that would be cool–I would go to Nashville for a whole semester, get all this hands on training. It would be a great experience builder.’”
Two years into his time at Bluffton, La Vallee will now have the opportunity to complete the Nashville program. Over the course of the fall semester, he’ll take specifically designed classes for a tech internship track and earn 16 credits along the way. The classes will focus on light settings, sound boards and other notable topics from the production world.
La Vallee cited the lights used Trans-Siberian Orchestra shows as the an example of the type of technical skills he’ll be learning and putting into practice during his internship.
Toward the end of his time in Nashville, La Vallee will have a chance to demonstrate all he’s learned when he goes on a tour with other students in the program. Students in the performance track will perform on the tour, and La Vallee and others on the tech internship track will be behind the scenes, running their sound and lights, setting up their amps and more.
“We’ll just rotate around certain colleges, certain little churches, just full circle it around [on the tour],” said La Vallee. “We travel with them, we set up and tear down all in the same day. That’s what ends up being the final product being promoted.”
When he arrives in Nashville in the fall, La Vallee will bring valuable experience from his involvement at Bluffton to the Contemporary Music Center. He has experience working tech in Yoder Recital Hall for everything from forum, chapel, the Lip Sync Battle and the annual performance of Handel’s Messiah.
Already one step ahead, La Vallee said he’s excited for his upcoming semester in Music City.
“[I’m most excited for] the experience–being able to meet a new variety of people…at this early stage of my career process in music tech,” said La Vallee. “I’m excited to be able to transition what I have learned here into that actual work environment down in Nashville.”
