“The chief quality of Hays’s music is a joyously earthy mysticism." Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Though an ardent user of electroacoustics in the early stages of her career, Sorrel Hays has focused mainly on opera since the 1990s and brought her experience with extended vocal and instrumental techniques into the realm of dramatic stage music.
About Sorrel Hays's opera at New York City Opera VOX 2008, OUR GIRAFFE:
".. certain aspects of numerous works made this writer choose the following operas for her Favorites List: Our Giraffe (for the quirky vocalizations of Zarafa and the pleasing lyrical music accented by the harp..." Karren Alenier at www.scene4.com
City Opera blows roof off American composers and librettists.. Our Giraffe, by the composer Sorrel Hays and the librettist Charles Flowers, was a deft and humorous study of a little-known historical episode: the gift of a giraffe from Ottoman Egypt to King Charles X of France in 1826. As the French—being French—argue decorously over the political, commercial and sexual ramifications of the giraffe’s arrival, Ms. Hays gives them music of a simplicity and charm happily reminiscent of Virgil Thomson.
New York Observer
BY RUSSELL PLATT | MAY 20, 2008
The comic “Queen Bee-ing, The Bee Opera” is fourth of Sorrel Hays’s dramas concerned with gender places and spaces. “The Bee Opera” was premiered at Medicine Show Theater, New York City, October, 2003, and scenes performed during 2002-2003 at Catskills Livingston Art Center and New Music Indaba National Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa. Elizabeth Wood on “The Bee Opera”:
“..utterly postmodernist, in the sense that it blended and pirated and hijacked and hybridised all manner of musical mannerisms, busily mingling and bustling like - well, very busy bees... a modern ballad opera, with its political, musical, and metaphorical ironies, imitations, deviations,perversities.. pure fun - from Hays’s wonderful, weirdly happy musical mind.” Dr. Elizabeth Wood
Sorrel Hays received eight commissions from German broadcasting to create and direct her productions at Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s experimental drama department. Collaborating with actors and musicians in New York and Europe, she developed unusual combinations of text and sound effect collage. This propelled her into electroacoustical operas such as the multilingual “Mapping Venus”, that uses a visionary meeting of Gertrude Stein as Chief Cartographer, Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard, Jessamyn West and others on the planet Venus to explore landscapes of personal consciousness.
"You want the latest in American avant-garde radio? Tune into Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Germany....Hays's pieces typically include mixed passages of speech and sound, along with snatches of her own music, all of them fading in and out of each other, in sum offering a rich and various verbal-musical (i.e. acoustic) texture. Hays' proposal for "Liebe im All/Love in Space" won a 1986 Westdeutscher Rundfunk Acoustica competition to get itself produced; once done, it became the WDR's nomination for the Prix Futura Berlin." Richard Kostelanetz The World Magazine Sept. 1989
Sorrel Hays began her career as beloved interpreter of Henry Cowell’s iconoclastic piano music and performer of her own keyboard music and that of other contemporary composers, when she was known as Doris Hays. Under that name she composed “Southern Voices for Orchestra” and other music that grew out of her childhood in Tennessee and Georgia, reflecting her southern region and its social conflicts. These concerns are documented in a film by George Stoney “Southern Voices: A Composer’s Exploration with Doris Hays”. In 1985 she took her grandmother’s name of Sorrel and began composing music for radio, video and stage. She documented in art audio and video women’s protests at Greenham Common and Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment. She began work in the experimental drama department of Westdeutscher Rundfunk at Cologne with often performed and exhibited pieces titled “Celebration of NO” and “Something (To Do) Doing”.
Hays’s spoof on American busyness “Something (To Do) Doing”, for 15 actors and scat singer, was exhibited in the Whitney Museum’s first audio art show in 1990. Her theater pieces and video art featured in the Copenhagen Festival 1996, Spoleto, Kassel Dokumenta, and exhibited at the Audio Museum Roskilde, Denmark, Southern Ear and Eye exhibition of the Virginia Contemporary Art Museum, and in a traveling exhibit of the American Film Institute.
The Chattanooga Opera commissioned Hays to write “The Glass Woman”, produced in New York in 1989/1993 by Encompass and Interart Theaters with the Chattanooga Opera, as one of Opera America’s Opera for the Nineties and Beyond.
"Sorrel Hays's opera "The Glass Woman" portrays six decades in the life of Anna Safley Houston, an antique dealer whose life's collection of precious glass objects is displayed in a museum ..in Chattanooga, Tennessee..Hays wrote the lyrics along with Sally Ordway, and the text-setting is so naturally done that I didn't think about it until afterwards..."Glass Woman" has much in common..with a number of American operas: its theme of a young woman dreaming about a world outside her rural background, its inventive grounding of musical form in rural hymnody and folk song, its confrontatiom between an embittered woman and society. ..It's high time a work in that vein was written by a woman, and the future of this one is worth keeping an ear out for." Kyle Gann Village Voice 8/22/89
Hays wrote “Sound Shadows” for actress Jane Lind, didjeridu, oboe, video, electronic keyboard and dancer as percussionist, to open the Whitney Museum’s first Acoustica Performance Festival. The film “House”, part of her “Sound Shadows” concert, was shown on Independent Focus, Channel 13 in New York City and Women in the Director’s Chair Festival Chicago.
"..most ambitious and varied was Sorrel Hays's "Sound Shadows", a multi-section dance piece that incorporated old-style electronic tape composition, as well as such comparatively new-fangled tachniques as sampling and video....musical materials and voices on the tape track serving as demarcating points. Interesting images emerged along the way. On the tape sections built from children's voices contrasted with others made from conversations with old women. Indian chants wove through parts of the work, and the sections at the beginning and end brought together new-agey synthesizer washes and a lyrical oboe line.
The dancer, Anita Bodrogi, moved through the work at a deliberate pace, often calling Jules Feiffer cartoons to mind. Since she danced on amplified materials, her movements contributed a brash layer of texture to the work....haunting oboe line and lowing sound of the didjeridu.
Allan Kozinn The New York Times May 2,1990
For the past ten years Sorrel Hays has created a series of pieces called “Traveling”, based on the microtonal fluctuations of tone generators. The most recent is “Debushing America” in collaboration with soprano Kristin Norderval, at the Flea Theater. "Cumulative ecstasy....contrapuntal/improv tour de force" wrote the Village Voice about the first in the series, called “Take A Back Country Road”.
The New York Foundation for the Arts awarded Sorrel Hays Fellowships in Media Arts and in Music Composition. She received awards from the Cary Trust, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Council on the Arts, the American Music Center, and Arts International. Her work is published by Henmar Press/ C. F. Peters, Hildegard Press and Tallapoosa Music, and recorded on New World, Finnadar Atlantic, Folkways, Tellus, Opus One, Townhall, Centaur and Wergo labels.
Presently Sorrel Hays is completing a book “Touching Sound” about lull music, and at work on a stage setting of Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly”. Her short opera "Toowhopera" Part I received its first performance as part of a commission of the Georgia Music Teachers Association, Nov. 5, 2009, at Shorter College.