In my opinion anything goes as long as you the composer can make it go. And this has been demonstrated through the centuries over and over and over again electronic composer and music Professor Eric Stokes. berlioz was an example of a composer who did what were considered to be outlandish things compositionally, but he brought them off and they were persuasive later generations of young composers studied very carefully what he did in those scores and followed suit And then imitated those ideas or techniques gimmicks if you will and expanded on them or did cheap invitations and so far. It is argued that his synthesizer is no more machine than the piano was to 18th century musicians the splits over new and traditional Sonic forms in music will always exist Stokes had to confront his own artistic prejudices in the sixties when he discovered Charles Ives. But things weren't always I came to see like I had been talked to think they were and like especially about myself my attitude Mike self concept was I think liberated by that Discovery and so I owe a great debt to the musical eyes. Not long after that after a year or two after that. I discovered the John Cage by a personal contact. I attended a presentation that he gave at Macalester College. And it was another kind of epiphany for me. It was a great. Very strong and positive experience of Discovery and what it taught me what I discovered from it through it. Was the marvelously inexhaustible supply of Sonic potential in the world. That it a lot of it depends on how one listens and the scales fell from her years at that at that moment and I could hear again. It was like being a child all over again instead of having all these. Confining prejudices and stereotypes that had been grafted onto me by my musical training over the years. I was suddenly so free again to listen just for the sake of listening. Stokes speaks of natural phenomena when he describes his music in conversations about new resources for musical compositions Birds Ice and leaves emerge. This piece is entitled on the Badlands Parables. The title is the most important thing. It's it's a kind of ignition or energy an energizing thing that focuses what form for me what the sound is going to be and how it's going to be a character it will have And how it will proceed through itself. Now another thing that's interesting there at that time. We had a malfunction in one of our in one of the synthesizers at the University lab and it was giving unpredictable but very appealing kind of bird like sounds Twitter rings and fluttering sounds and I took to that very much and I got two so I used it in the second movement of Badlands as a bird bird like Thing and that was the energizing the start the spark for me for that particular movement. They didn't use to. Because I wasn't open to them. I was I was going to be some sort of. Near agent of the Gods and I would be struck by lightning and and then transmit some sort of message from high up as a composer, but I don't think that way anymore. I'm like John Cage Stokes doesn't see himself staging Sensational events for the avant-garde, but he does enjoy doing as much experimental material as possible. I would like to design them for Small small numbers of performers who are sympathetic to the interdisciplinary cross-media techniques and tasks that I that I am asking him to perform. The task is not easy typical composers commission's don't often accommodate those kinds of ideas. The process is often limiting when you have a commission. There's usually a deadline that's the first thing. The second thing is that you are usually limited to a certain category of performers and a certain number of them and sometimes if you're smart you are able to find out or if you're lucky. Or just because you belong to the same community and you know how good they are. How about how good the performers are another very practical consideration is how much rehearsal time they will give to Preparing it and that rehearsal time is will be divided by the length of the piece that you supply to them. So if you know, you're going to have 3 hours of rehearsal and you deliver a 30-minute peace to them you're cutting it very thin as to how many times they can even just get through it and Stokes has found that musicians often rebelled against his expanding definition of Music. Where would I go with a piece? For instance? This one work I want to do which is which I would call I believe I'll call it the katcha which is the old medieval Italian musical word for a a hunter's piece of music if I ask a group of A section of an orchestra to perform that I'm going to have difficulty with what we spoke about earlier there. Their investment of of an enormous amount of time in the technique of their particular instrument. If I ask an instrumentalist to put down his French horn and take a Canada Goose call and play it. I may very possibly run into opposition from him right? There will be a serious barrier perhaps the composer admits that much of his experimental work will be performed within the confines of the Ivory Tower and he's not discouraged there always seems to be an audience which Chris Stokes is an important concern but he adds that an artist has the feedback even without a group of people listening to the final product. I play both roles almost simultaneously. Maybe they are indeed simultaneous. That is I listening to what my imagination is proposing because that's that's where it happens the imagination proposes and and some other part of you apart from the imagination in to some extent listens and says, oh that's nice. Let's do that or an end in that sense. It is all that other part of you. That's the real definition of your audience composer Eric Stokes.