Peter Strickholm was born on Jan. 3, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota and lived in Chicago, Upsalla Sweden, and San Francisco before moving to Bloomington, Indiana at age 8. His father is of Estonian descent and his mother is of Minnesota and Wisconsin German heritage ("with a little pinky of French"). Of family history includes his paternal grandmother's family homesteading in Alberta with Estonian communities at the beginning of the 1900s, and his maternal great-grandfather was a Lutheran missionary for the Chiricahua Apaches in southern Arizona in the 1890s. He started composing in earnest at age 10, living three blocks from the Indiana University school of music, and his early juvenilia influences included boogie-woogie, the rock of the Beatles and the Doors, and later, Gershwin (he analyzed Rhapsody in Blue and learned the Three Preludes at age 12) and contemporary jazz and the harmonic language of American popular song. His principle piano teacher growing up was Judy Caswell. He played piano in the Bloomington High School North Jazz Band, under much influence of the great jazz pedagogue David Baker, the high school jazz band which set the standard which has produced the likes of prodigies Rachel and Sara Caswell and Julian Bransby in the jazz world today.

Peter graduated from Colorado College in 1980, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a degree in mathematics and a de-facto double major in music, and with a broad background in the liberal arts and the natural sciences. His primary teachers at Colorado College were Carlton Gamer in theory and composition, Curtis Smith in piano, and Steven Scott in electronic music. Other teachers included the great musicologist Albert Seay, Michael Grace, and harpist Patricia Croke. He returned to Bloomington in 1980, studied composition briefly with Frederick Fox, and has studied in theory, musicology, and jazz, and taken coursework from the folklore/ethnomusicology institute, at Indiana since. He received a masters' in composition from the Univ. of Colorado Boulder in 1990 where his composition teachers were Richard Toensing and Charles Eakin. He also studied briefly at Duke in 1982.

His background and interests have included the culture, landscape, and anthropology of the American West and the American Southwest, which he has tried to put to music. His background in the natural sciences led to a masters' in biology at Indiana in 1995, with work on chaos theory and population biology. His compositional inclinations have been moving away from the atonalism of Austrio-German Late Modernism and trying to utilize the 20th century methods of the Franco-Russian and Iberian styles and contemporary tonalities including jazz. He became interested in Irish music at Colorado College, and has kept that interest up in Bloomington where it flourishes among some of the country's greats. He keeps up his interest in jazz and absorbs the jazz scene around Bloomington. He annually attends the Lotus Festival in Bloomington every fall, perhaps the foremost world music festival in the Midwest today. His compositions have been performed in places ranging from Colorado Springs and Boulder, Colorado, to Demarest, New Jersey. He has an interest in modern dance, and has had several of his pieces choreographed for public. He attends the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bloomington, the church of his family origin, where he frequently has pieces performed as part of the content of service.