OUR TEAM
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Ann Elise Smoot performs throughout the United States, Great Britain and Europe, with a repertoire that ranges from the 14th century to the present day, and has received wide critical acclaim for her ability to move between musical eras, styles and genres with sympathy and flair. After completing two degrees at Yale, where she won several prizes for scholarship and for organ playing, she moved to England, where she studied organ and harpsichord at the Royal Academy of Music, and privately with Peter Hurford and Dame Gillian Weir. Three critically acclaimed recordings have been issued by the JAV label.
Education has also been a major focus of her career. She was a Professor of Organ at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and for 15 years was director of the St. Giles Junior Organ Conservatoire, a unique and highly successful programme for teenage organists. In 2014 Ann Elise became the Director of Oundle for Organists; OfO runs innovative and popular courses and provides year-round support for young organists. She was the Education Editor of The Organists’ Review magazine from 2011-2015.
Ann Elise is married to James Vivian, the Director of Music at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. She has two young children and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and loves to read on the rare occasions they will allow this. Visiting historic buildings and museums, writing, and walking are also favourite pastimes.
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Roxanne joined YOST as its Director in September 2023, and is a musician, educator and arts administrator based in the East Midlands. She is committed to promoting music education, and is a founding Trustee and Artistic Director of Leicester MusicFest, a charity working to widen access to the arts for young people of all backgrounds. She coordinates a busy organ education programme at English Martyrs' Catholic School, where she also co-directs the Schola Cantorum. She has mentored young organists as part of several organ scholarship schemes in Leicestershire, most recently at St Anne’s, Western Park.
Roxanne was organ scholar at Lincoln Cathedral, and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where she accompanied and directed the choir on major international tours and played the organ for three recordings on the Regent label. She enjoys working with young adult singers, and for the past eleven years was Musical Director of Leicester University Chamber Choir. With LUCC she toured extensively and directed several recordings, most recently of sacred and secular choral miniatures by Paul Edwards. She has been a tutor in choral conducting for the Jennifer Bate Organ Academy, and is an occasional choral composer, with a small handful of pieces in church and cathedral use.
Roxanne lives in Leicester with her husband John, who is also a musician, and their young son. In her spare time she enjoys allotment gardening, playing the tin whistle badly in a folk band, and exploring Leicestershire on the canal tow paths.
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Dr Martin Clarke is patron and a founding trustee of the Young Organ Scholar’s Trust. He grew up in Lincolnshire before studying History at Jesus College, Cambridge University. He stayed on after his first degree to do doctoral research into the family structure of 19th century East London gaining his PhD in 1985.
His professional career was most spent in private equity, latterly as Partner and Global Head of Consumer at Permira LLP. He subsequently led a management buy-in of the Automobile Association, the UK’s largest roadside assistance business, and successfully floated it on the London Stock Exchange in 2014. He served as Group CFO for five years before to leaving to concentrate on personal investing from his own family office.
Martin is a former trustee and director of both the Handel House Museum in London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre where he remains a member of Council. His present charitable commitments include roles as a trustee at the Holburne Museum in Bath, the York Minster Fund and Iford Arts. He also retains a connection with Jesus College as a member of the Society of St Radegund.He lives in Bath and London with his wife and daughter. Besides choral music he is passionate about collecting art, fine wine and early English silver.
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Chris was a retired secondary school head, whose love of organ and church music started when he was a young boy and joined his church choir. The beauty of the music-making and setting, and the discipline and high standards it instilled, remained with him all his life. In 2012 Chris returned to this church to find the music in a state of decline, with no choir and no professional organist. It was this that drove him, with the help of Dr Martin Clarke, to establish YOST, beginning with four organ scholars in Yorkshire in 2012, with the official launch of YOST in 2013. Chris wrote, ‘The deep love of organ and church music, for most of us, started early in our lives and gave us a lifelong gift of quality, inspiration and enrichment of our lives and our faith. In the twenty-first century so few young people even hear such wonderful music. The Dr Martin Clarke Young Organ Scholars’ Trust aims to give young people this experience.’ Chris passed away in December 2021.
