Yves G. Clouzet

1984 -

Yves Clouzet, a trumpet player and conductor, is the band director at Campion Academy in Colorado, a position he has held since 2012. Previously he taught at Shenandoah Valley Academy in Virginia for a year and at the Ruth Murdoch Elementary School in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

Yves was born in Villa Libertador San Martin, Enter Rios, Argentina, and raised in Berrien Springs, Michigan, the younger of two sons of Roberto Haroldo and Nora Ethel Clouzet. His mother was an accomplished pianist and flutist who had graduated from high school in Argentina with a performance diploma in piano and was passionate about music. She has taken graduate courses in music and is working on a master’s degree at Andrews University.

His father, a counselor and administrator, is an amateur singer who loves music. Because of the influence of both parents, from his earliest years Yves enjoyed music and everything associated with it. He recently talked about his musical training as a child and teenager:

I started piano lessons with my mother when I was three or four. My grandmother gave me a violin when I was six, and I took lessons from a teacher at a nearby conservatory while we were living in Argentina. After we moved to Berrien Springs when I was nine, I had violin lessons from a graduate student for a year and then studied with Carla Trynchuk for four years until I entered academy. During those years I played in a string group at the academy and youth orchestras in the area.

I had learned to play the trumpet in a beginning band at the grade school and played in the band at the academy and after I entered college. I also gained some facility as a guitarist in my teenage years.

Yves attended RMES and after graduating from Andrews Academy in 2002, enrolled as a student in architecture at Andrews University. In 2003 he traveled to France, where he studied at the Adventist University in Collonges for a year. Although he resumed his studies in architecture upon his return to AU in 2004, he changed his major to music education at the end of the first semester.

Once registered as a music major, he was active in both the orchestra and band and gained proficiency on brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. During that time he also conducted the band at RMES for three years. Upon graduating with a B.Mus. in music education in 2011, Clouzet was hired to teach instruments and algebra and assist in music at Shenandoah Valley Academy in Virginia. Because of his study in Collonges, he has almost enough hours for a major French.

While at AU, he had met Melissa Anderson, who was directing the choral program at SVA, and when she had accepted that position there in 2007, they had maintained a long-distance relationship for a little over four years. After he was hired by SVA in 2011, they married in December of that year. They accepted music positions at Campion Academy at the end of the school year and began teaching there that fall.

ds/2012

Sources: Information in the biography for Yves G. Clouzet at RMES and Shenandoah websites; other online sources (2012).