She is the Ann Landers of the flute world and a world class music educator. From her home on a small island, just off Nanaimo, flutist Jennifer Cluff provides expertise, encouragement, and a stunning wealth of resources to flutists around the world. Her website  is easily the largest of its kind in the world, and receives 20,000 hits a month. It is the quality, and not the size of this website that is so remarkable. Jen provides expertise on every imaginable aspect of flute playing, from tone production to solutions for technical problems and repertoire. Her articles and discussions are rich and detailed, and peppered with her own instructional YouTube videos and arrangements, as well as links to the very best pedagogy out there from both past and living greats of the flute world. Jen also spends considerable time providing detailed private help to people who email her. A wealth of performing and teaching experience, as well as a lifetime’s interest in all aspects of flute music and performance inform Jen’s musical teachings. Former first flute of the Vancouver Island Symphony and flute teacher at VIU, she has performed in orchestras, duets, trios, and chamber music groups. She currently teaches at the Nanaimo Conservatory of Music. Tall, and boldly beautiful, Jen has a big presence and a dynamic, free-spirited personality. Whether teaching online or in person, or just talking about music, she radiates joyful enthusiasm. A very expressive flutist, known for having a big sound and gorgeous tone, she is equally expressive when she teaches or talks about music. She communicates with passion, precision and humour, gesticulating and often erupting into boisterous laughter. To observe her in action is to get the feeling that she is windswept by something larger than herself. Jen’s love of music was first cultured at home when her mother played records and she and her brothers and sisters would dance and sing in the kitchen. Here, Jen was introduced to a wide range of classical music, and also to the soundtracks of musicals. These captured her imagination, and she especially remembers singing along and dancing to Fiddler on the Roof. Jen’s philosophy of music education is rooted in her own experiences as a student, and she credits two exceptional music teachers for igniting her passion for flute and her love of classical music. She began the flute in grade seven under the tutelage of band teacher, Ann Crysdale. Jen describes Crysdale as “enthusiastic, encouraging, kind, driven and dynamic”. Crysdale provided extensive performance opportunities for her students and so motivated them that, after three months, they were performing orchestral arrangements in a variety of venues. Jen was hooked. She was already shining with good tone and a big sound, and she advanced quickly, often being given solo opportunities. At the age of thirteen, she started taking private lessons, and was soon working with her all-time favourite flute teacher, Karin Schindler. Like Ann Crysdale, Schindler was enthusiastic, non-critical, encouraging and kind. She was also funny and humble. In three years, Jen was at the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) grade ten level, and performing regularly. She then won a scholarship to study at RCM, completed her ARCT (Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music) at the RCM school, and went on to complete a Bachelor of Music in Flute Performance at the University of Toronto. If Jen came to appreciate the importance of enthusiasm and encouragement in fostering musical development from her early instructors, this understanding was really brought home to her, along with an appreciation for how vulnerable students are to criticism, after an RCM adjudicator chastised her for moving too much as she was playing, complaining that it made her seasick. Jen took this comment to heart and in subsequent years, as she practised the many hours required at her level, she focused on keeping her body still. This resulted in a shoulder injury which became so severe that she was eventually unable to play for six years. This experience had a profound effect on Jen, stimulating her to become an expert on the physical aspects of playing the flute so that she could play again, and committing her to sharing this information with other flutists. “Mind over matter does not work, in music,” Jen asserts. “If you force your body to try to achieve on an instrument, ignoring all the physical and ergonomic challenges of your instrument, injury will surely follow. The mind and the body must work together.” Jen further believes that flexibility, suppleness and the correct positioning of the body are essential, not only for avoiding injury when playing many hours a day, but also, along with the mastery of technique, for playing musically. To play musically, according to Jen, requires emotional openness. People must be open in order to express themselves, to connect to the music and to others, and to truly share the experience with others. A supportive music teacher can help students to be emotionally open to expressing themselves through their music, and being physically relaxed and poised is part of this. Jen compares learning the flute to learning gymnastics in that both require years of training the body and the mind. With correct and timely instruction, the flutist gradually builds up all aspects of flute playing. For Jen, tone is always the first priority, and should never be sacrificed for technique. Technique is improved gradually from what she describes as “a smorgasbord “of instructional strategies and materials. This is where Jen’s genius as a flute instructor is most readily apparent. As one of her students, Karin Berman, notes: “I have never taken a problem, or flute difficulty, or question to Jen for which she did not have a solution or answer. I like that she is an expert in demonstrating how to do it, and is able to explain why. I try to follow, and it is inspiring being in her presence, to say the least.” These days, when Jen is not helping flutists around the world through her website, arranging music for flute trios, or teaching her adult students, she is working on her book. Another labour of musical love for Jen, this book is intended to supplement all the instructional material provided on her website. Created to encourage and inspire flutists, it is a series of arrangements of beautiful music, designed to foster the development of specific flute skills. Jennifer Cluff tirelessly encourages others to live joyously through music and to share their music with others. This is the message this exceptional Vancouver Island woman and music educator is sending out through the air waves from her Island home, and around the world by internet. It is a life-affirming breeze.

Deborah Graham
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