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Biography

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Terrence Niska was born in a small town in northern Wisconsin, (when is not really all that important) and studied music at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire where he earned a BME in Voice and Piano. After a semester off, he enrolled at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ where he earned his Masters Degree in Coaching & Accompanying. While at Westminster, he had the enormous honor to study with the amazing, and soft-spoken, vocal accompanist Dalton Baldwin. He also took part in many wonderful choral concerts as a member of the symphonic choir under the direction of Joseph Flummerfelt singing some of the greatest choral masterpieces under several of the world’s most famous conductors: Leonard Bernstein conducting his Chichester Psalms, Riccardo Muti conducting Verdi’s Requiem, Sir David Willcocks conducting Carl Orff’s masterpiece Carmina Burana, and Zubin Mehta conducting Bethoven’s Ninth Symphony culminating in the glorious “Ode to Joy.”

That he pursued a career in music is not all that surprising considering one of his earliest memories is of standing on stage in grade school, in his bath robe, singing the “Little Drummer Boy.” Fast forward to the end of his college career when he planned to follow a path to become a coach/accompanist when there was a fork in the road. He took the path that led to joining the vocal ensemble Five By Design (which until then was Hot Jazz), and spent the next twenty-plus years touring the U.S. and Canada singing the music of the Great American Songbook in productions created by the group and with many of the vocal arrangements written by Terrence. It was during these years that his love of composing began to grow, initially writing mostly vocal charts, but more recently he turned his attention to writing for the piano.

Growing up, Terrence was attracted to the piano; perhaps because one of his older brothers was taking lessons and he enjoyed the sound, but it was not until high school that he studied the instrument seriously, while simultaneously discovering the joys of classical music. Writing for the piano has become a way for Terrence to boil down the sounds he hears in his head and put them into works for two or four hands, with the ultimate goal of one day having them orchestrated. 

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