Nik Mikas

From Young Composers

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Nik Mikas (Nikola Petar Vucicevich, Mikas being his mother's maiden name) was born on September 20th, 1989. He began study of music at an early age, acquiring and learning guitar and drums before entering school at 4. He has also taken piano lessons on and off throughout his life and plays casually, but dislikes performing in general.

In his youth, Mikas became fascinated with electronics and that field in general, eventually leading up to his apprenticeship under his maternal grandfather, Petar Mikas (hence his adoption of the name). By the age of 10, Mikas had constructed a fair amount of automatum with his grandfather, though the urge to build in electronics was dwindling in favour of a new hobby: Magic. From age 12 to 16, Mikas studied the art of prestidigitation very academically, earning him wide respect among the Toronto magic community. But this was also to dwindle, neither magic nor electronics quite being able to satisfy the urge to create.

Then he found Bach. In Bach, Mikas found a true endless absorption, one which could keep him intellectually invigorated, while at the same time offering the magical quality of art called "mystery". Through Bach, he learned of the art of counterpoint, which greatly influenced his study in this field and brought him to the discovery of his one obsession: Fugue. Determined to understand the magical art of multiple singing lines, Mikas undertook the study of great masters before, namely Palestrina, Buxtehude, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert among other minor artists (such as Locatelli, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Hummel, etc...). He studied for a brief period with Ivan Zilman (a student of Joe Pass), who taught him some of his most fundamental lessons, but is mostly self taught via the works of the masters.

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