In 1995, Daniel Powers was named composer in residence with the Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra. He has been a member of the orchestra, as assistant principal viola, since 1986, and has also served as the orchestra's librarian.
Since becoming composer in residence, Powers has written several major works for the orchestra, including two piano concertos featuring his wife, Martha Krasnican, and Concerto Piccolo, written for soloist Kate Prouty.
Powers was born in 1960, and began composing at an early age. He took his first formal lessons, with Rudi Van Dijk, the composer in residence with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in 1973. He received a Bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1982 and a Master's from Indiana University in 1987. His composition teachers included Joseph Wood, Fred Fox, Earle Brown, and Harvey Sollberger.
As a composer, Powers has received commissions for works from the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Bloomington Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Saxophone Quartet, Triofus, and numerous individuals and ensembles. As an arranger, he is known for a series of Christmas music arrangements for various forces, which have received hundred of performances across the Unites States and abroad, and have been recorded by the Kiev Philharmonic Orchestra, Michigan State University Children's Choir, and Cincinnati Boychoir; he has also arranged Irish songs and dances, and American popular songs.
In 2008, an orchestral work, The Starry Messenger, was released worldwide in the ERM Media recording Masterworks of the New Era, Volume 12, performed by the Prague Radio Symphony. In 2003, his song O You Whom I Often and Silently Come was named the winner of the first Ned Rorem Award for Song Composition. In 2000, his song Spring for treble chorus and piano was a winner of the Illiana New Music for Young Performers and Audiences Competition. In 1987, he received an honorable mention in the National Association of Composers’ Young Composer’s Competition , for his song cycle Words Dry and Riderless.
Powers is affiliated with BMI, the Society of Composers, Inc., and The American Music Center.