Mélanie Clapiès

Born in Paris, Dr. Mélanie Clapiès is a multifaceted soloist and chamber musician with an active international career. She has appeared at festivals in the United States, France, the UK, Russia, Malta, Italy, Spain, and Algeria, including Yellow Barn, Colmar, Musique en roue libre, 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 Monteleón. Her collaborators have included Anthony Marwood, Roger Tapping, John Myerscough, Pavel Vernikov, Vladimir Mendelssohn, Victor Julien-Laferrière, Adam Laloum, Guillaume Vincent, and Patrick Hemmerlé.

Her artistic pursuits range from traditional repertoire to new, experimental, and electronic music, which she explores through performance, improvisation, and composition. As part of her commitment to uncovering lesser-known works, she recorded Pierrots Lunaires (Fondamenta/Sony, 2014), an album of violin–cello duos with Yan Levionnois.

Dr. Clapiès studied at the Conservatoires Nationaux Supérieurs de Musique in Lyon and Paris before moving to the United States, where she earned her M.M. and A.D. at the Yale School of Music and her D.M.A. at the Manhattan School of Music in the studio of Mark Steinberg. She has received numerous honors, including the Zonta Club Laureate (2001), the Broadus Erle Prize (2013), the Yale School of Music Alumni Association Prize (2014), the Philip Francis Nelson Prize (2015), and the Saul Braverman Award (2021). A winner of Yale’s Woolsey Concerto Competition in 2015, she performed Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with orchestra. She is also a member of Pi Kappa Lambda.

Dr. Clapiès joined the violin faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Music as Clinical Professor of Violin in fall 2025. She previously taught at the conservatories in Toulon and Bordeaux, the École Normale de Musique in Paris, and Butler University.

Outside of her teaching and performing, she devotes time to composing, painting, writing fiction, and hiking with her husband, musician Matt Moldover.