Ellie Steere
Arielle Steere is a musician and artist from Los Angeles, California. She studied classical piano from age eight, attending the Silverlake Conservatory, Interlochen Academy and Colburn Conservatory. She has been teaching private piano lessons since age fourteen, as well as group lessons to younger students. More than anything, her teaching style revolves around developing a lifelong love for music and toolbox for playing. Being trained rigorously in classical music has both given her an appreciation of a technical and linear approach to teaching, but she incorporates a more emotive approach, encouraging students to voice what they love about music and structuring lessons around that.
From high school on, listening to a wide breadth of music has led her to branch out from classical performance. She has been in multiple punk bands, studied jazz at Los Angeles City College, scored short films, and has learned some accordion and acoustic guitar. She received a grant in Summer of 2024 to be an art resident of AQ Tushetii in Tusheti, Georgia, where she and a group of electronic musicians worked collectively on their practices inspired by traditional Georgian music. This winter she received a research grant to interview artists, music venues, and non-profits providing affordable lessons, recording and performance space in the Southern United States.
She received her B.A from UC Berkeley in landscape architecture, throughout her studies working as a radio DJ for KALX. After graduating, she is working full-time on her own music, art practice and as a piano teacher. She’s excited to get you started on your musical journey!
1.Alive or dead: What musician would you do anything to see perform/meet?
There are too many choices, so I will list a few. Charles Mingus, Beethoven, Nina Simone, and Mississippi John Hurt.
2. Greatest musical influence?
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was an Ethiopian composer and nun. If I could sit with anyone for an hour it would be her. Her music is a haunting and beautiful mix of Ethiopian, monk chants, jazz, and Western Classical. She is a feminist: the first woman to work in Ethiopian civil service and sing in an Ethiopian Orthodox choir. For untold reasons, and after being admitted but unable to attend the Royal Conservatory of Music, she became a nun. I read and reread a Guardian interview with her. Emahoy is well versed in politics, she paints religious icons, she has stacks of sheet music. She has led a rich life before and since vowing herself to religion. “We can’t always choose what life brings,” she told The Guardian’s interviewer. “But we can choose how to respond.”
3. Any hidden talents besides music?
I love to garden; the beauty of gardening is like a puzzle, kind of like learning a piece of music.
4. What did you want to be while you were growing up?
I wanted to be a pilot, I liked the idea of sitting in front of that big board of colorful buttons!
5. If you could have any ‘Super Power’, which one would it be?
Breathing underwater.
6. If you could master any other instrument which would it be?
The drums!
8. It’s your last meal: What would it be?
Fish tacos!
9. You’re sent to a deserted island, and you only have one album to listen to: Which is it?
This is just impossible, but either Charles Mingus’s Black Saint and the Sinner Lady or Everyone Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We by the Cranberries.
10. If you could leave one lesson with your students what would it be?
