A profile of St. Paul composer Eric Stokes, who died in a car accident at the age of 68. Report includes a portion of Composer’s Voice 1993 interview with Stokes.
In a career spanning decades, Stokes wrote music built on classic American melodies which was performed by orchestras around the country. He began teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1961, where he founded the University's electronic music laboratory and the contemporary ensemble First Minnesota Moving and Storage Warehouse Band. Stokes believed in an American rather than a European esthetic of music. Late in his career he experimented with found sounds including moving ice, seed pods, scissors and glass.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: Saint Paul composer, Eric Stokes, died last night in a car accident at the age of 68. In a career spanning decades, Stokes wrote music built on classic American melodies, which was performed by orchestras around the country. He began teaching at the University of Minnesota in 1961, where he founded the university's electronic music laboratory and the contemporary ensemble First Minnesota Moving and Storage Warehouse Band. Stokes believed in an American rather than a European aesthetic of music.
Late in his career, he experimented with found sounds, including moving ice, seed pods, scissors, and glass. In a conversation with Minnesota Public Radio's Bill Morelock for the Composer's Voice Series in 1993, Stokes talked of how he was approached in the early 1970s by Minnesota Orchestra music director Stanislav Skrowaczewski, as construction of Orchestra Hall neared completion in downtown Minneapolis.
ERIC STOKES: Skrowaczewski called me. I went over to see him one day, and he said we'd like you to write a work for the new hall. And I was absolutely thrilled. And I thought, marvelous. Wow! What a chance. Here's my call to write the Great American Symphony.
[CHUCKLES]
And then at one point in the conversation, he suddenly said to me, Eric. He said, Eric, no strings, no strings like that. And I couldn't believe what he was talking. And I thought, good heavens, your orchestra. That's the very heart and soul of your orchestra, and you want me not to use it? And my heart sank at that moment because I was already building these castles in the air of the Great American Symphony I was going to compose.
Well, we talked a little bit more, and I went off. And I felt like, oh, gosh, what has happened? A great opportunity turned in this direction. But quickly, in a matter of a week or two, I began to realize that he unwittingly probably had handed me a great opportunity because what he had done was to free me from the convention of a symphony. It was like fate stepping in and giving me what fate knew I needed to have, really. And I was free. I was free of this symphony business.
BILL MORELOCK: What kind of sparks of the imagination are going on when you take a tune that you apparently love very much? "Cindy. Get Along Home, Cindy, Cindy." And you turn it into a very joyous sound that you create out of that.
ERIC STOKES: Well, I love the old mountain folk songs and prairie folk songs. So many of them. I think it's a rich heritage we have. It's a grand, old tradition among composers to take some earlier existing music and to rethink it, to include it in what that composer is doing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER: Composer Eric Stokes, speaking with Minnesota Public Radio's Bill Morelock on the program, Composer's Voice, produced by Ellen Baker. Stokes died last night in a car crash at the age of 68. For more information about his life and work, check the MPR website at www.mpr.org.