Letters from Leadership

In just a few weeks, the NFA community will be heading to San Antonio for the 52nd annual convention—Flauta Mundi: Global Voices of the Flute. As always, the NFA staff will be joined by committee chairs and appointees in the enormous effort to make sure the huge array of components of the convention go off without a hitch.

Aside from the tireless and creative planning of our artistic team, Program Chair Alberto Almarza and Assistant Program Chair Sarah Shin, committees and volunteers have laid the groundwork for their sessions and concerts over a period of months and years. The New Music Advisory Committee’s commissioning program, for example, awarded commissions to three composers to write pieces for the Young Artists, High School, and Piccolo competitions as early as December 2022. These new works are performed in a dedicated program as well as during the competitions. Planning for this year’s Youth Flute Day, with more than 200 local students participating, has involved months in the planning by the Youth Engagement Committee.

And when the convention is over and we’ve taken a breath, our committees and staff focus on what comes next. While our new program chair team digs into 2025 convention planning, we begin work with the 2026 team and confirm venues for 2027 and 2028 conventions. We also get to work on all the non-convention-related programs that make the NFA a year-round organization.

Our two education programs, the Lessons Scholarship Program and the Young Artists Mentorship Program, will prepare for the next cycle of teaching, supporting, and mentoring the next generation of flutists. The next Online Events Series featuring free one-hour sessions created by flutists for our community will get underway. The 2025 NFA competition cycle will begin as more than 500 flutists review repertoire and prepare their recordings for the first round. Meanwhile, committees working in the fields of archives and oral history, performance health care, IDEA (inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility), and many others will seek ways to enhance the lives of flutists, honor their legacy, and build our community for the future. (See a list of all the NFA’s committees here.)

As the 2024 convention fades from our memories, I hope you will stay engaged, get involved, and be part of the NFA’s history and future.

One of the topics I hear about frequently in my conversations at the NFA is the need for transparency. I’ve been thinking about what this means at the NFA as we work together to facilitate all the activities of our unique organization.

My first stop to clarify my interpretation was the dictionary. According to Merriam-Webster, “Transparency is the bedrock of ethics. Transparency is an amalgamation of many important values that include honesty, respect, and responsibility.” The Cambridge Dictionary describes it as “A situation in which business and financial activities are done in an open way without secrets, so that people can trust that they are fair and honest.”

Putting these together, it becomes clear that when NFA members ask for transparency, they are asking for openness and honesty about how decisions are made, by whom and when, and they want to know that their voice is heard and respected. Whether this is about proposal acceptance, financial decisions, exhibit hall placement, board nominations, virtual event selections, competitions, and whatever activity involves a decision that impacts on our members and their goals.

To respond to needs for more transparency, you’ll start seeing messaging that aims to unpack some of the processes that keep the NFA’s activities on track, many of which involve a vast array of volunteers/appointees as well as our staff. You’ll see more information about how different things are funded and who is responsible for making them happen, such as a committee or appointee.

Rebecca Johnson’s piece in this issue of Flutist Quarterly, along with Alberto Almarza and Sarah Shin’s interview on the new NFA Monthly Cast, aim to show what’s involved in the proposal review process. My previous blog series and recent podcast interview on NFA’s finances unpack how the NFA’s money is spent, especially member dues and registration fees, and how the financial pieces fit together. Our podcast series is intended to give members a look “behind the curtain” at some key areas of NFA operations.

And while it has been said that the NFA can be bureaucratic at times, with forms to fill out and a review process for applications of every kind, I strongly believe that introducing structures that are the same for everyone who applies—whether it’s for a job, an internship, a nomination, or a proposal—create transparency and fairness.

Returning to our dictionary definition, trust is perhaps the most important key to sustaining a healthy organization where members feel that their voices are heard and decisions are made in an honest, fair, and open way. By increasing transparency, my hope is that we will build a more trusting community where everyone feels respected and that their goals within the flute and music world remain at the center of what we do.

-Jennifer Clarke
Executive Director of the NFA

Throughout the nearly two years I’ve been writing these columns, I’ve tried to include some insight on NFA procedural items to increase transparency and help folks understand how different aspects of the organization function. We’re a large organization with many different segments, and each of us has become acquainted with the NFA through our own door—perhaps through a competition, presenting or performing, online events, flute choir, or accessing membership benefits.

We’re about to gather for our annual convention in San Antonio, Texas, in early August 2024. It will, without a doubt, be a celebratory four days full of high-energy presentations and performances, an opportunity to try new products and instruments, a social experience with friends old and new, and a way to be inspired for our future. San Antonio is a vibrant city full of diversity, culture, and natural beauty, and it will be a fantastic location to come together.

But why San Antonio? At this time, in the middle of 2024, we have our 2025 and 2026 contracts for convention venues signed. We are working on 2027 and 2028 and hope to have those finalized by the end of the year. We have to commit to locations fairly far in advance to secure lower hotel rates for our members and reserve the spaces we need. This also means, of course, that we can’t alter course easily later. We have a consultant who tries to research sites that will fit our needs and works with the NFA team to build a comprehensive proposal for our Board of Directors.

Important factors for site selection:

• Our ideal weekend is the second full weekend in August, still in the first half of the month. This is (hopefully) early enough to have students and professors still in summer mode but late enough to have people free from summer festivals and programs. The second choice is the first weekend in August.
• Regional rotation. We try to bring the convention closer to all U.S.–based flutists once every three to four years. This means that it will be hot much of the time, since a large portion of the continental U.S. is likely to be hot in August.
• Available space. The NFA requires quite a lot of ballroom space compared to the size of our convention, due to our propensity for giving concerts requiring large stages. Not all cities have a venue that actually works for what we’re trying to do or are interested in our business.
• Part of booking convention sites is a negotiation of many cost-related factors. We negotiate the discounted rate for hotel rooms, how many hotel nights our attendees will book, the fees for renting space, how much catering we’re committing to, and what we’ll pay for staff rooms.
• Comfort and travel factors. Will there be hotel renovations during our dates? What is the biggest airport in the area, and how challenging is it for NFA members to get there? Is the area walkable? Are there restaurants in the area? How many hotels are we committing to and how far is the walk from the hotel to the convention center?

This brings us back to San Antonio. It’s the seventh largest city in the US and the first time the NFA has been back to Texas since 2002. With the cancellation of the 2020 convention in Dallas, when looking at our next site to book in post-pandemic times, it was natural to try again for Texas. The organization had recently looked at San Antonio, but those plans fell through. For our 2024 needs, it seemed a great fit of location, prices, and amenities, and fulfilled the goal of bringing our convention closer to a different part of the country than it had been lately. Building up to this convention, we’ve had years of planning by our Program Chair Alberto Almarza and Assistant Program Chair Sarah Shin, careful local input by Rachel Woolf, hard work by the NFA staff, and the impact of all of the NFA appointees (Board of Directors and officers, competition coordinators, committee chairs, and other specialized positions). It takes a massive team to get everything ready for this year’s event. Hope to see you there for this annual celebration of music and the flute!

Being the program chair (PC) for an NFA convention provides a much different look at the organization. I was honored to serve in this position in 2019. The NFA appoints a PC—basically an artistic director with an added load of administrative tasks—to oversee an upcoming convention about two-and-a-half years in advance, which is when the creative juices start flowing. This gives the committee a year-and-a-half before member proposals are due to decide upon the theme, select an assistant program chair (APC), map out priorities for some of the headline performers, and think about ways to incorporate the host city into the offerings.

Then, in the fall of each year, hundreds of NFA members submit proposals to present at the following summer’s convention. We often receive 400 to 450 proposals—though the two most recent conventions in Texas (2020, postponed to 2021 and virtual, and the upcoming 2024) attracted more than 500. At the same time, the NFA staff sends the PC’s team a scheduling grid with many time slots already reserved for competitions and important annual events, as well as room restrictions that are specific to each convention venue.

Along with a programming committee of 8 to 10 people, the PC and APC go through all the proposals, collated by type of event, so everything can be compared by the way they will function in the schedule. Workshops are compared to other workshops, panel discussions compared to other panels. The performance proposals (a massive number) are evaluated and honed into programs that can all be fit into the schedule grid and number of rooms that NFA has rented.

After four months of painstaking evaluation, whittling down, and schedule juggling, people are informed of the results. Unfortunately, many proposals are denied, sometimes due to lack of detail or quality of the proposal and much of the time simply due to time and schedule limitations. The acceptance rate varies between about 33% and 50%—in a very high submission year like this one, it is about one-third.

Though many excellent ideas must be denied each year for space and time reasons (please try again in the future!), there are always things folks can do to improve the quality of their submissions. For starters, each fall there’s a helpful proposal workshop where the NFA staff and program chair talk through the process and the PC team talks about their programming priorities. We encourage you to attend!

In the meantime, here are some thoughts for you to consider as you craft future proposals:

• Proposals that adhere to the theme of the convention are especially attractive.
• When proposals seem incomplete (no repertoire listed, no personnel, or some combination thereof), they are less compelling when reviewed alongside those that are very detailed, and therefore they are less likely to succeed.
• It is important to submit a recording of you playing the actual piece you’re asking to perform.
• The recordings you have on your website cannot serve as the sound samples you need. When evaluating so many proposals, there’s not time for the PC to look through what you have on offer. Please link to the actual recordings the PC should consider, even if they are in a large list on your website.
• If you’re asking to play a newly commissioned work, you need to submit recordings of yourself and of the composer’s similar work. And, of course, make sure the piece will be ready in time.
• Proposals submitted on behalf of a committee should indicate how the session will help the committee achieve its goals for the benefit of the NFA community. Committee proposals that are performance-based and don’t directly advance the goals of the committee and organization are unlikely to be selected, as are those that lack detail.

As you can see, selecting and organizing a convention’s programming is a gargantuan task for the PC—but is ultimately a rewarding part of one’s life and career. When you’re there in person seeing an audience engage with the incredible number of moving parts that comprise each NFA gathering…it is amazing! When you see us saying say “thank you” to the PC team over and over again in person, in the program book, and on our media channels, we truly mean it—this is a seriously dedicated investment of time, resources, and love.

Each year, when the NFA calls for organizational nominations, we include a call for future program chairs. I hope this might help get you thinking about who might be an amazing addition to our PC roster. We’re looking for someone who is familiar with the structure of NFA conventions, well connected in the flute community, organized and detail oriented, and a visionary artist and phenomenal flutist. It’s a tall order, but we also all know these folks exist! We take this process seriously. You’ll hear news of the 2026 PC soon, and we’ll be looking for 2027’s in next winter’s nominations cycle. We’ll hope to hear from you!

-Rebecca Johnson
President of the NFA