Student Spotlight: Julian DuTemple

How did you decide to come to Tufts and study music at Tufts?
Tufts landed on my radar as a very fortunate accident. I was first starting to look at colleges the summer before my junior year of high school, and during this time I went to Boston with my family to tour Northeastern, per recommendation of a family friend. When we arrived on the Fenway campus, it turned out that my parents had gotten the tour start time wrong, so we had a bit of time to drive around Boston. I don't remember why or how, but this led to us taking an audio walking tour of Tufts Campus, and I remember liking it a lot more than I did the tour of Northeastern three hours later.

Now, at this time, I didn't really know what I wanted to focus my studies in yet, but I had been a musician for several years and I knew whatever I ended up doing in college, I also wanted to do music (I never even considered a conservatory or music college because I wanted to explore my other academic interests and do more than solely music). I took note of the music courses at Tufts when we went, and the option to carve your own path through the music major really stuck out to me as something I wanted to explore further. A year later, the seed of an interest in music composition had grown into my major passion, and my family and I decided that we would come back to get a guided tour of Tufts. Once again, I loved what I saw, but this time I had also reached out to Professor Lehrman a few weeks prior because I wanted to talk more in depth about the music department. He graciously accepted, and I vividly remember our conversations and me showing him the very first composition I had ever written (it was objectively terrible, and I continue to thank Prof. Lehrman for his faith in me).

After this, I was pretty sold on Tufts. In October 2022, I submitted my Early Decision 1 application and the rest is history.

Tell us about your favorite music course so far.
I've had great experiences in all my music classes so far. In regard to my professional path, Composition for Film taught by Professor Kareem Roustom helped me immensely and was also very enjoyable. But my personal favorite has to be a Special Topics course called Ludomusicology, taught by Professor Stephen Pennington.

This class was the first I ever attended at college, comprised of only six students, and I was far and away the youngest taking it. The subject matter of the class was music and its relationship to games and play, and though I initially added it naively expecting it to be a course focusing on video game music, it was so much more than that. Stephen made the course just as much about social science, psychology, and storytelling as about games, and the connections made between all these fields made it so there came points in class time where I could almost feel my mind expanding. This was the kind of education that little freshman me had always wanted in college - centered around music, but intersecting with fields that I had also had longtime interests in and topics that I had never even considered before.

What are you involved in, at the music department?
I've handled the weekly bookings for the Tufts Freshman 15 Jazz Ensemble ever since sophomore year, as I was the only music major in the E-board after our previous director graduated.

In the spring of my freshman year, I took a composition seminar with my now-major advisor Professor John McDonald, where two pieces of mine premiered at the Tufts concert series, and though it has been a while since a piece of mine has been performed there, I have been working on a lot of new material to hopefully be performed there soon again.

On any given day and time, there's probably a 15% chance you can find me in the music computer lab upstairs. I love experimenting with all the VSTs and DAWs, I record vocals for my solo music there often when I'm alone, It's where I compose and produce most of my electronic pieces, and one time I was even there until after 3AM because I lost track of time and nobody came to kick me out.

What are you involved in outside of the music department?
In the fall of my sophomore year, I discovered that I really liked computer science, and it is now my second major. I play bass in a band called Dust Jacket, and I plan and host basement shows at my house off-campus. I am on the production team for Survivor Tufts. I am somewhat involved in Tufts Gaming Hub.

What are you listening to at the moment? 
This past week, I've listened to albums by Portishead, Ben Folds Five, The Doors, David Bowie, Yeasayer, Joy Division, and Andrew Bird.