About
Jefferson Todd Frazier
1800 St. James Place #303 Houston, Texas 77056 / (713) 562-5514 / Fax. (713) 552-0612
todd@jtoddfrazier.com / yahouston.org / afatexas.org / jtoddfrazier.com / methodistperformingarts.com
Jefferson Todd Frazier is a composer, educator and non-profit leader, with 18 years of professional executive level arts administration, development, management and strategic planning experience in Houston, TX.
Mr. Frazier is the Executive Director of Young Audiences of Houston (YAH), one of 31 independent U.S. chapters of Young Audiences, Inc. Founded in 1956 by violinist Fredel Lack with support from Ms. Ima Hogg and Mrs. William P. Hobby, the mission of YAH is to educate and inspire children through the fine arts. In its most recently completed season alone, YAH’s roster of 78 professional artists, representing all fine arts disciplines, brought the arts and culture to more than 335,000 K-12 children through over 2,200 high quality performances, workshops, and residences in school and community sites throughout the greater Houston area. In 2010, through the support of a YA National Affiliate Development Grant, YAH will expand its services to incorporate the management of a centralized scheduling and educational support service web site; Houston Arts Partners; Arts 4 All, which, in addition to the programs of YAH, will collectively promote, support and coordinate the education programs of more than 10 of the largest Houston arts organizations through a unique collaborative partnership.
In addition, Mr. Frazier serves as Managing Director for The Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) at Methodist Hospital. CPAM is the nation’s most comprehensive group of medical professionals, based in the world-renowned Texas Medical Center, teamed to provide preventive, diagnostic, specialty and emergency care to performing artists. Complementing its healthcare service, CPAM also curates and presents professional arts programs through concerts, workshops and gallery exhibits at the Methodist Hospital open to the public as well as supports innovative research projects that explore the various uses of the arts in relationship to improved human performance, cognitive development, rehabilitation and therapy.
Frazier’s primary accomplishment to date in the field or arts education is the Founding of American Festival for the Arts (AFA), where he served for 15 years as Executive Director and trained the organizations next era of executive staff. AFA was established in 1993 to safeguard the availability of high quality music education and performance opportunities for youth and to broaden the audience for American works and the standard classical music literature. Its primary project, the AFA Summer Music Conservatory, which employs 75 of the regions finest music educators and trains over 300 promising Southeast Texas K-12 students each summer, offers a broad and innovative curriculum of advanced musical training and performance with orchestra/chamber music, jazz, chorus, composition, theory/history, private lesson and elective divisions at campuses in Houston and Beaumont, Texas.
As a composer, Frazier has written extensively for choral and instrumental ensembles throughout North and South America and is presently at work on a large-scale oratorio based on the life of Thomas Jefferson, an opera set at the Texas Medical Center in Houston “Breath of Life,” and a commission to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Nanotechnology to be premiered at Rice University on 10/10/10. He is a graduate of the Wilhelm Schole, River Oaks Baptist School and the Episcopal High School in Houston, TX and received his undergraduate and graduate level music composition and pedagogy training from The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and The Juilliard School in New York, NY where his major teachers included American composers David Diamond and Samuel Adler. On the occasion of the Juilliard School’s 100th anniversary in 2006, Frazier was recognized as one of 100 distinguished alumni and profiled in the Juilliard Journal’s “A Quiet Revolution: Juilliard Alumni and The Transformation of Education in America Through the Arts.
He has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Houston Arts Alliance, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Texas Music Teachers Association, Texas Junior Chamber of Commerce, The Juilliard and Eastman Schools of Music, and most recently, as a recipient of the 2009 Ovation Award from the Houston Grand Opera, 2010 Advocate of Education Award from Phi Delta Kappa International, and 2010 Cosmopolis Award from the Wilhelm Schole International. He serves as a Director of the Texas Lyceum and on the Advisory Boards of the Texas Medical Center’s National Center for Human Performance, Wilhelm Schole International Foundation, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, ArtReach, the Texas-French Alliance for the Arts, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, is a Fellow of the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program and recently served as a member of the Texas Commission on the Arts Grant Review Panel and Houston Independent School District Foundation’s Leadership Council for the Fine Arts.
As someone with a broad range of interests, in addition to his work in the field of the arts, Frazier is a Director of OMNIBANK and President of J. F. Brazos Ltd., the management company for a wide variety of interests in agriculture, real estate, cultural/historical/educational materials, and intellectual property. Frazier is a 6th generation Texan and is proud of his wife Jennifer, son Mac, daughter Kenzie, and his Merriman, Frazier, Bryant and McReynolds Clans.
a huge subject we had been handed, and what a challenge it would be to distill that subject down to a manageable theme.” Frazier and Harrigan both knew what they didn’t want–an earnest, stentorian musical documentary. They wanted something that felt alive and contemporary but also visibly connected to Texas’ rich and complex history. In the end, they decided the best way to tell the story of Texas was through the voice of a more-or-less representative Texan, an 81 year old oilman reminiscing about a long-ago morning in a West Texas canyon that changed his life. Buffalo Altar is scored for narrator, full orchestra, off stage brass quartet, off stage flute, a large farm bell, and western wind chimes. The short story, Buffalo Altar, by Stephen Harrigan, is based on an archaeological discovery of bison bones from a hunt at Caprock Canyons State Park, near Canyon, Texas, which revealed evidence of the Folsom culture, dating signs of civilized life in Texas to over 10,000 years ago.
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