Presenters

William Boughton has been the Music Director of Orchestras in the UK, Finland and the USA and Guest Conducted around the world. He recently retired from teaching at Yale and was the Director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. Born in the UK into a musical family that believed in all the children learning a musical instrument and participating in musical events at home and in the community. He and his wife, Janet and their two children, came to the United States in 2007 when he became the 10th Music Director of the New Haven Symphony. William has always been an advocate for young artists and programmed music by living composers for ‘the creators are the very life-blood of all art-forms expressing each generation’s challenges in innovative ways’.

When not found at the Theater or one the many wonderful Art Museums in Connecticut he can be found gardening or sailing in The Sound. 

Tom Duffy composer and conductor, has been writing for and leading jazz ensembles, wind ensembles, concert bands, marching bands, and orchestras for more than forty years, including music directing UConn’s Nutmeg Summer Playhouse. The oldest of ten kids, he was raised by a tone-deaf dad and a play-piano-by-ear mom, whose constantly evolving, self-styled rendition of “Peg O’ My Heart” and her complete devotion to The Ed Sullivan Show, filled the house with music of all types. That early “soundtrack” sparked Tom’s love of improvisation—and every type of music. His siblings claim that he “used up” all the musical talent in the family with his second-grade mastery of the accordion and his teenage guitar playing (in rock bands and … in church—thanks, Pope Paul VI!).

Tom’s BMI music publishing company, Plankton Press, reflects his conviction—evidenced through his many compositions for less-experienced ensembles and his work as a clinician—that early school arts programs are the plankton of the cultural food chain.  With a colleague in Yale’s School of Nursing, Tom has pioneered a music-based intervention to train medical and nursing students to better develop their stethoscope auscultation skills.

Tom’s wife, Valerie, is a scientist who plays the flute better than Tom plays anything. Their son Chris is a Latin-teaching linguist who relaxes by thumping out difficult heavy metal bass lines. When he’s not teaching, Tom is usually working on his 1826 Federal farmhouse and his three-acre “farm,” perched on his orange tractor and doing his best to stay out of the sun.