""Structure 123" bounces with aplomb and "Take a Back Country Road" has a kind of down-home romantic squiggling, like music Giacinto Scelsi might have written had he grown up in Tennessee." Kyle Gann Village Voice April 29, 1997

"Hays's "Rocker Parts" incorporated numerous tonal clusters, made flexible use of Cowell's trademark overtones, evoking modern mechanization, mania, and angst as well as providing moments of pure pianistic wizardry. In Cowell's own music, Sorrel Hays boldly etched the seemingly thorny tone clusters with a senstive control of dynamics and color, at times showing more "touch" with her elbows, forearms and palms than many a pianist has in his fingers." Jeff Rosenfeld American Record Guide July/August 1997

"..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

"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

"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 fadinng 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

"Harmony" was a curious but fascinating work for strings that shifted back and forth between tonality and atonality in swelling nightmarish phrases, the whole having an organlike effect." The Baltimore Evening Sun April 21, 1986

".."Etwas Tun " is an acoustic collage based on Hays's poem "Something (To Do) Doing", on her experience of Gertrude Stein's dictum that American materialism is based not on possession but on constant activity. ..Hays dives right into the activity of life itself; she mixes both German and English languages with completely heterogeneous noises, numerous voices for the acoustic salad of various tone colors, for making a hectic tonal foundation which is contrapuntally interwoven with pauses or noises which radiate peace (ship's whistles, bells, cuckoo clocks)...it appears that the unremitting tumult, overwhelming hectic busyness of noises, voices and word-cascades, is an expression of flight from the horror of being in a vacuum, emptiness. Thus each restless, agitated activity heaped upon yet anoth activity of "Something (To Do) Doing" works as background to the measured, ponderous reflection on the never-changing "I", producing an impression of happy superficiality and joyful irresponsibility." Michael Schaefermeyer, FUNK Korrespondenz November 24, 19 84

"M.O.M. 'N P.O.P." "Brilliant because of the clarity of her self-revelation: Doris (Sorrel) Hays, treasured interpreter of Cowell's music, allowed her pianist's trauma-- the erotic and categorical aspects of professional pressures in keyboard operations--- to be framed in film, keyboard music and shadow play pantomime..she allowed her most personal experiences to be compositionally composed into images.." Lutz Lesle Die Welt May 15, 1984

"In "Tunings", a marvelously flexible and expressive (though wordless) soprano voice is used instrumentally in partnership and contrast with violin, cello and piano weaving exquisitely textured tissues of sound." Joseph McClellan The Washington Post May 18,1982

"Southern Voices for Orchestra" "babble of voices at an all day sing on the grounds of a small country church, incorporating a sort of blues fantasy created by seven brief solos by piano and voice...Invoking lazy Southern days, an eerie rattle-like flexatone cutting through the sweetness of the Sunday School atmosphere..spirited and bouyant....recalling with intriguing textures the rhythmic patterns of an auctioneer's chant." Musical America August,1982

"Sensevents is a multiarts concert with plastic sculptures, programmed lights, taped electronic music, musicians and dancers---all of which are set in motion by the audience itself...nothing will start until audience members step on the various switches. One the dancers will act as enticer, like a clown or Pied Piper, inviting the audience to "come step", thus setting the sculptures in motion which will tell the musicians when to start playing according to the rules Miss Hays set up. The music has been written to change mood every ten minutes, as are the separate but similar light programs. The first portion Miss Hays calls "staying there", meaning that the motion, music and lights are all close in, as if standing in place. The second section is described as "appearing to go somewhere" with lots of scales and repetitious phrases that go nowhere, like a spinning of wheels. The third portion is a "going out and coming back in again" like the ebb and flow of a tide, with the lights and sound showing growth and decay. And the last is "frustrated motion", very agitated and noisy... If it sounds like something you've never seen before, you're right. It is a new art form for a new age created out of the materials and sounds of a plastic and electronic world." Helen C. Smith Atlanta Constitution January 10, 1976