Maria Kelemen - founder/director of YES School of Music
Hungarian - born viola player Maria Kelemen left her country in 1956 and with the help of a Ford scholarship studied and graduated with a First Prize violin and viola diploma from the respected Brussels and Liege Royal Music Conservatories in 1961. She started her professional career at the age of twenty as the leader of the viola section in the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra where she remained until 1984. As a founding member of the “Amsterdam Kern Ensemble” piano quartet, she toured extensively throughout Europe, South Africa, Russia and Latin America and recorded for EMI.
She is co-author of a violin tutor entitled “Violin Technique - The Natural Way” published in English in 1982 and a regular contributor to international magazines in the latest teaching methods for strings.
In 1988 she founded the Young European Strings School of Music. In the same year she started to organise international Master Classes and Festivals both in Ireland and abroad. While she devotes a lot of her time to fund raising and administering these projects, her first interest lies in researching and developing methods of teaching which overcome the barrier of language.
She has developed new methods of instrumental teaching using interactive and creative elements to conducive results.
Words as a means to describe and help to conceptualise spatial movements are often misunderstood and are rather more of a hindrance than a help. By approaching the teaching of a string instrument from day one through the development of the “inner” ear i.e. the Kodaly approach suggests that the beauty of the sound determines the criteria of good posture of the upper body, the students’ overall understanding of music is as natural to them as the speaking of a mother tongue.
