For TJ Cienki, Singing Is His Passion

You can be forgiven for thinking that East Greenwich resident TJ Cienki is a recent graduate of EGHS. After all, Cienki attended EG schools until ninth grade, and for the past four years he appeared regularly with the EGHS chorus in concerts.

Actually, Cienki is a recent graduate of the Prout School in Wakefield, where he went for high school to better pursue his love of the performing arts.

Wakefield’s Contemporary Theater Company recognized that passion and his talent in its award of a $250 scholarship to Cienki. He will study voice in the fall at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

“I’ve always been singing,” said Cienki. “I remember doing it ever since I was little.”

He didn’t get involved in theater until Cole Middle School. Then he began to study voice with Dr. Fred Scheff. The decision to attend Prout was practical, he said. Prout simply placed more emphasis on the performing arts.

But he stayed involved with the choral program both because of his devotion to the director, Jan Breidenbach, and his love of singing whenever he could. It didn’t hurt that he was male. Boys seem to be more reticent about chorus than girls.

Cienki will be studying opera in Boston, not a path he was interested in until recently.

“My voice was always bigger,” he said, so he was encouraged to try opera. But, “I wasn’t really a big fan of opera at first.”

Midway through his junior year, that started to change. “I started going to the live screenings from the Met,” the Metropolitan Opera in New York, that are shown at Showcase. “I just realized how much skill and stamina is involved,” he said.

This summer, Cienki is working two jobs - at the Rec Department as a camp counselor and at Dunkin Donuts. When he’s not working, he said, “I’ll just keep singing and practicing and preparing for the fall.”