First Person / Opening Convocation Address

“The Arts hold a special place in my heart. The warm, rich, intimate beauty of Rembrandt; the dazzling and weird spectacle of Brueghel; the alternate realities of Dali were all new to me as an undergraduate and intrigue me to this day. But nothing intrigued me more than music. As a listener I was transported to other worlds more wondrous than Titan or Mars. They were as vivid, extensive, and engrossing as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, as a Rembrandt self-portrait, as Hamlet’s Elsinore Castle, as a chart of the solar system—but words or pictures or charts of data could not come close to describing, let alone explaining them.” —Professor of Music Thomas E. Flaherty, Sept. 2, 2008.

In this photo, he conducts the audience in a musical experiment with a couple of flashlights.