Steven Speciale is a pianist, conductor, and educator. He currently teaches Electronic Music, AP Music Theory, and Choir at Loyola High School of Los Angeles while also serving as Director of Music for St. Andrew’s in Fullerton. He holds a Bachelors of Music in Piano Performance from U.C. Irvine where he also did graduate work in piano and conducting. Further graduate studies were pursued at Loyola Marymount University.
Under Steven’s direction, the Loyola choir has sung at Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall, live on television from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Our Lady Queen of Angels Cathedral, and annually at the Lessons & Carols Service he founded at St. John’s Cathedral.
After establishing a thirty-seat Mac Music Lab at Loyola High School, Steven reinvented the music curriculum from text-based history survey courses to project-based portfolio classes. Since the revamp, students have composed David Tudor-inspired versions of Rainforest IV, written iPhone apps as standalone music compositions, built reactive music tables, invented Qr-code music trees, and many other electronic music/multimedia projects.
The success of these installations led Steven to found an annual Spring festival of new media art called OHM at Loyola High School. It is now a department-wide festival that, in addition to the multimedia/soundart installations, includes music concerts, a film festival, and a visual arts show.
Steven blogs about his music and teaching at: mostlynoise.wordpress.com
This year’s project is inspired by the Samuel Beckett play “Krapp’s Last Tape.” During the play, the protagonist reveals his weariness as he pursues artistic excellence while listening to himself on tapes recorded on his birthday over the decades. For our piece, participants will place cassettes on a table triggering movies with sound designs to evoke events and memories past. A microphone and camera will capture the live interaction and further delay/distort the experience. The Loyola students will create each of the cassettes exploring the transformation of memory through the filter of time.