Faculty hosts
Born in Paris, Dr. Mélanie Clapiès is a multifaceted soloist and a passionate educator. Before joining the Butler string faculty as an Assistant Professor in Violin she taught at the Conservatories in Toulon and Bordeaux as well as at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. She regularly played with Paris Opera’s orchestra, the conductor-less ensemble Les Dissonances, and the period orchestra Le Cercle de l’Harmonie.
A dedicated chamber music player, in 2012 she founded the festival “En attendant…” in Burgundy, France, with cellist Yan Levionnois, which featured young musicians from France and the UK. She has participated in many other festivals in the United States, France, the UK, Russia, Malta, Italy, Spain, and Algeria, including Yellow Barn, Colmar, Musique en roue libre, the Deauville’s Festival de Pâques and Août Musical, la Roque d’Anthéron, the Salon Romantique of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, “Suona Francese”, Portogruaro, and the Fondation Monteleon. Her collaborators have included musicians such as Anthony Marwood, Roger Tapping, John Myerscough, Pavel Vernikov, Vladimir Mendelssohn, VictorJulien-Laferrière, Adam Laloum, and Guillaume Vincent.
Dr. Clapiès’s wide-ranging musical focuses include new and experimental music, as well as electronic music, which she explores through performing, improvising, and composing. As a part of her ongoing interest in researching and uplifting unusual repertoire, she recorded an album of duos for violin and cello with cellist Yan Levionnois (Pierrots Lunaires, Fondamenta/Sony, 2014). Since 2020, she has regularly collaborated and recorded with composer Joshua Penman on improvisation-based pieces including violin, piano, and electronics.
Dr. Clapiès studied at the Conservatoires Nationaux Supérieurs de Musique in both Lyon and Paris. After having moved to the United States, she received her M.M. and A.D. from the Yale School of Music where she studied with Syoko Aki. She completed a Doctoral degree at the Manhattan School of Music in the studio of Mark Steinberg. Named a Zonta Club laureate in 2001, she has also received the Broadus Erle Prize (2013), the Yale School of Music Alumni Association Prize (2014), the Philip Francis Nelson Prize from Yale University (2015), and the Saul Braverman Award (2021). At Yale, she was the winner of the Woolsey Concerto Competition in 2015 with Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto.
When she is not teaching or performing concerts, Dr. Clapiès splits her time between composing, painting, writing fiction, or hiking with her husband Matt Moldover.
“Rarely have I heard such a tender, vulnerable, intimate, and angelic performance of this great work.” […]
About the Berg Violin Concerto; Jonathan Cott, author of Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein and Conversations with Glenn Gould.
Dr. Lisa Brooks is currently the Dean of the Jordan College of the Arts at Butler, in addition to Professor of Violin. She held previous faculty appointments at Baylor University, the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, Messiah College, and Dickinson College.
Dr. Brooks received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in violin performance in four years from West Virginia University, where she was a student of Donald Portnoy. While completing her doctorate in violin performance from the State University of NewYork at Stony Brook, she studied with Joyce Robbins, and as a member of the Stony Brook graduate piano trio, coached extensively with Julius Levine and Gilbert Kalish. Other important teachers have included Rafael Bronstein, Ariana Bronne, Stanley Ritchie, William DePasquale, and Carol Taleff.
As an orchestral musician, Dr. Brooks is currently principal second violinist of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and a frequent substitute musician with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra on both violin and viola. She was associate concertmaster of the Waco Symphony and performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Opera Company of Philadelphia, and Harrisburg and Reading Symphony Orchestras; she also has toured nationally with the Pennsylvania Ballet Company. She was an artist-fellow at the 1984 and1985 Bach Aria Festivals, and was a finalist in the 1981 A.S.T.A. National Solo Competition. Dr. Brooks was a founding member of the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, a period-instrument ensemble.
Influenced by workshops and training sessions she has participated in at the Lincoln Center Institute for Aesthetic Education in New York City, Dr. Brooks has developed and taught a variety of academic courses at Butler. These include a non-traditional, listening-based approach to music appreciation for non-music majors, as well as a two-semester First Year Seminar sequence based on Classical Music and Society, which incorporates critical thinking, reading, writing, and speaking. In demand as a clinician for student musicians and teaching colleagues alike, her recent lectures and recitals have included presentations for the IMEA convention, the College Music Society’s Institute for Gender and Music, and a lecture-recital at a conference celebrating women in music held at Ohio University. In addition, Dr. Brooks presents the pre-concert lectures for the Ensemble Music Society.
In 2013, Dr. Brooks received the inaugural Faculty Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership from Butler University, and in 2001, she received a Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis.