AFA (American Festival for the Arts)

AFA (American Festival for the Arts) is Houston’s largest independent non-profit provider of music education programs. In 2022-2023, AFA served 2,025 young musicians from 170 schools in 52,000+ hours of educational programming, culminating in 75+ concerts presented free of charge to the general public, many in tandem with AFA’s collaborative arts partners.

AFA was founded in 1993 by Houston-born composer J. Todd Frazier as a series of touring music education residencies at colleges and museums across Texas. After two years, AFA launched its flagship program, the Summer Music Festival at Episcopal High School. Acclaimed for safeguarding quality arts education experiences at a time of decreased support for the arts in our schools, the Festival has been hailed as a model of intensive music education programming and now serves more than 400 instrumentalists, vocalists, and composers in grades 3-12 each year and is held at the award-winning Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Downtown Houston.

In 2010, AFA launched in-depth weekend-based opportunities (Houston Girls Chorus, Chamber Music Academy, and Composition Studies), to serve a growing need for quality programs in a variety of musical disciplines in Houston’s Old 6th Ward. The following year, AFA launched Engage AFA, offering a diverse array of free or low-cost customized in-school and after-school residencies, clinics and master classes to underserved schools. In 2021, AFA laid down new roots in the East End Cultural District, utilizing Garza Studies for their weekend-based opportunities. In 2022, AFA launched DeLUXE K!DS In Harmony with the Houston Symphony, a tuition free after-school violin program in Houston’s Fifth Ward. In 2023, AFA piloted a tuition free, large-scale chamber music program during the school day in collaboration with HSPVA Friends for HISD’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts instrumental students. This program makes Kinder HSPVA one of the only public fine arts high schools in the country to offer chamber music to all interested students, no matter what their grade or experience level.

AFA ensures that students have access to its programs regardless of their socio-economic status through AFA’s Play It Forward Fund. This fund provides financial aid and transportation assistance to nearly two-thirds of students enrolled in AFA programs and underwrites Engage AFA programs so that they can be provided at little or no cost to partner schools and organizations. In the 2022-23 season, AFA provided financial aid or free programming to 91% of its students.

Since its inception thirty–one years ago, AFA’s primary goal has been to address arts education needs not currently being met in the community and to complement existing activities, whether by other arts organizations or by area school districts. AFA’s partnerships with leading arts organizations and a variety of local school districts have distinguished AFA for its willingness to respond to the needs of the broader music education community through both investment of resources and collaborative program development.