After service as a U.S. Navy pilot in World War II, Stires worked as a television advertising executive, first for NBC in California and then later for CBS in Boston.
Although he had begun improvising jazz on the piano while still a small child, he did not devote himself to music as a career until 1962 when he studied composition with Nicolas Slonimsky and Francis Judd Cooke.
Amongst his students were Trey Anastasio, a member of the band Phish, film composer/guitarist John Kasiewicz, composer/sound-artist Rama Gottfried, and Jamie Masefield of the Jazz Mandolin Project.
Stires' electric guitar concerto, Chat Rooms, was written expressly for Anastasio who premiered it in 2001 with the Vermont Youth Orchestra under Troy Peters, an event covered on national television.
[2] In 2004, his violin concerto was premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York in a performance by the Vermont Youth Orchestra with Ruotao Mao, first violinist of the Amabile Quartet, as the soloist.