The chief quality of Hays's music is a joyously earthy mysticism. Village Voice, April 29, 1997

Sorrel Hays first drew the attention of the national press with Sensevents for six instrumental soloists, motorized sculptures, dancers and interactive audience, premiered by Kent Baker Dancers, with orchestra directed by Sorrel Hays, and sculptures built by her, in the Lincoln Center Festival, August, 1976. As the AP reported, Hays credo was "We eat the unusual for breakfast cereal every morning. Why not in music?" At a performance in Atlanta’s Lenox Mall by Atlanta Symphony players, the concert stopped them in their tracks. Thousands showed up and children sat on the switch mats that acted as conductors for the musicians, causing a nonstop performance and temporary standstill in the mall.

Hays combines music with sculpture, film/video, dance, and actors in a variety of notated and improvised forms. Her 1998 two act opera Mapping Venus, with principal text by Gertrude Stein, is based on the text-sound Hörspiel Dream in Her Mind which premiered at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne in 1995. Dream in Her Mind uses an imaginary meeting of Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegarde, Jessamyn West and others on the planet Venus to explore the landscapes of personal consciousness. Hays has received seven commissions from German broadcasting since 1983, to compose and direct her work in productions for the experimental arm of the WDR Hörspiel department in Cologne. Given broad access to studios and technical assistance at the Colgne facilties Hays developed remarkable combinations of vocal music with text and sound effect collage, that propelled her into theatrical stage works of electroacoustic opera such as Mapping Venus.

Hays’s music was featured in the 1996 Copenhagen Festival, the New Music America Express to Hartford, the Kassel Dokumenta, at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Spoleto Festival. She composed Sound Shadows for didjeridu, oboe, video, electronic keyboard and dancer as percussionists, to open the Whitney Museum’s first Audio Art Festival 1990. The film House, part of Sound Shadows concert, was shown at Women in the Directors Chair Festival in Chicago, and on the Independent Focus series of Channel 13 in New York City.

Hays and her music are the subjects of a film documentary by George Stoney, "Southern Voices: A Composer’s Exploration", a journey into childhood memories via the melodies and rhythms of Southern dialect. Hays has composed many works with southern influences, including Tunings for string quartet, and an opera The Glass Woman, based on the life of an eccentric Arkansas antiques collector, produced in New York in 1989 and 1993.

"Cumulative ecstasy....contrapuntal/improv tour de force" wrote the Village Voice , about Take A Back Country Road. Another work that has regional roots, it features Sorrel Hays performing on synthesizer keyboard and electronic saxophone and is on the CD recording from New World Records. Her music is found also on Tellus, Opus One, Wergo, Townhall and Smithsonian Folkways.

During 1989-1990 Sorrel Hays was a resident artist at the Yamaha Communications and Research Center in New York City, commissioned to create music for the Yamaha MIDI Grand Piano. These pieces, 90’s, A Calendar Bracelet , for MIDI Grand and tone generator, are recorded on the CD Soundbridge from Opus One.

Sorrel Hays has produced a number of works especially for the medium of radio. As many American artists found in the last decades of the twentieth century, radio offers possibilities to explore audio in a different way than live performance, with the ability to combine text, instrumental and vocal music with sound effects and aural ambiances in new ways. As a consequence, some of Hays's works from these years originated in broadcast programs. Echo U.S. Continental, the third in her radio series exploring aural space, aired over American public radio in 1991, supported with a grant from the NEA. The Hub, Metropolis Atlanta premiered in 1989 at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne, and was in Cityscape Installations during the 1996 Copenhagen Festival. M.O.M. & P.O.P. for film and 3 pianists premiered at the 1984 Radio Bremen Pro Musica Nova festival and at the National Womens Studies Conference at Rutgers University. Something (To Do) Doing/Etwas Tun, scored for 15 actor/chanters and scat singer, premiered in 1984 at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne and was exhibited in the first Whitney Museum audio art show, April 1990. Hays's docudrama about women's peace camps Disarming the World/Pulling Its Leg premiered 1986 over WNYC in Manhattan, supported with funds from the NEA Media program. She collaborated on a series of programs about lullabies, called "Lullaby, The Universal Tradition" supported with funding from the Satellite Program Development Fund and aired on public radio in the Horizon series of National Public Radio.

Hays has worked with noted Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroglu on albums of contemporary music, including the recording premiere of his "Rosa" for piano solo, and her landmark Cowell piano album which Mimaroglu produced for Finnadar Atlantic. In a tribute to Mimaroglu and honoring her association with him, she was presented by the Istanbul Yapi Kredi Festival October 1998 in a concert of her electroacoustic music for saxophone and synth, and piano keyboard works by Mimaroglu, Cowell and Hays.

Sorrel Hays was born Doris Hays in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1985 she adopted the name Sorrel, (her maternal grandmother’s family name was Sorrels), because she likes its sound. Hays began her international career as composer/pianist when she won first prize in the Gaudeamus Competition for Interpreters of Contemporary Music at Rotterdam, Holland, and recorded programs of twentieth century music for Atlantic/Finnadar Records and European broadcasting stations. In 1978 she gave the premiere of Henry Cowell’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. She has been closely identified with the cluster music of Cowell, and is one of the world’s foremost performers of cluster piano music.

Townhall Records reissued her landmark recording "Sorrel Doris Hays Plays Henry Cowell" in a 1997 centennial edition to mark Cowell’s hundredth birthday. She was presented in a Hays/Cowell concert at Merkin Hall in New York City, March 13, 1997, for the Henry Cowell’s Musical Worlds Festival. Her A Birthday Book for voice, oboe and tuba, was commissioned for the Festival. Sorrel opened the Cowell’s Musical Legacy Festival at Hertz Hall, Berkeley, California, January 31, 1997, with solo performances, and played the Berkeley and New York premieres with pianist Beatriz Roman of Rocker Parts for two pianos that she composed especially for Cowell’s birthday concerts. Her performance in the Berkeley Festival is found on a New Albion CD.

Sorrel Hays directed the first American lecture concert series on women’s music at the New School for Social Research in 1976. Her Tunings was performed in the first concert of women’s music at the Library of Congress. From 1976 to 1985 she was an activist for gender parity among composers and the institutions that support cultural life in America. She was assistant chairperson of the International League of Women Composers, directing the activities of the New York branch, periodically guiding the programs of the League nationally when the chairperson was teaching out of the United States. She founded and distributed the ILWC's radio series "Expressions". Hays was representative to the National Music Council, and consultant to National Public Radio to help determine new policies regarding equity for women in programming and balanced representation and support. She persistently lobbied ASCAP, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for a fair representation of women in awards categories, repertoire lists and fellowships. Her advocacy resulted in women being added to the Standard Awards Panel of ASCAP for the first time in its history; to the addition of female composers to the list of the Rockefeller Foundation's major competition for performers of American music; and increased applications from women to the NEA.

Hays was on the faculties and guest lecturer at numerous universities in the United States including that of Queens College CUNY, Georgia State University, Ithaca College, Converse College Vassar, Cornell College, Brooklyn College CUNY,the University of Wisconsin, and in Artist Residencies with Rhode Island College, the Copenhagen Soundlaboratory, the Georgia Council for the Arts, the New York Foundation on the Humanities and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 1998 she was consulting designer and director of the new graduate program in electronic music at Yildiz University, Istanbul and gave lectures on her music at Vassar College and Brooklyn College.

From 1974-1984 Sorrel Hays was consultant in new music for a revolutionary new text series for children called MUSIC, published by Silver Burdett. She wrote a component for the series about composing and also many compositions for children, found on the series recordings. During this period Hays taught summer workshops across the United States, for classroom and music teachers, introducing them to graphic notations, electronic music techniques and philosophies of experimental composers.

Hays is an Artist Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, awarded Fellowships in Music Composition, 1998, and in Media Arts, 1985. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Council on the Arts, the Astraea Foundation, Meet the Composer, Eastman Foundation, and the Tennessee Foundation for the Humanities. Her music is published by Henmar Press/ C. F. Peters, Hildegard Press and Tallapoosa Music. Profiles of her work appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and in composer portraits for Australian Broadcasting.

Education and Early Career Years
Sorrel Doris Hays was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and moved to Chattanooga with her parents and two brothers when she was four. She was valedictorian of the Central High School senior class. She studied piano for eight years with Harold Cadek at the Cadek Conservatory, graduating from the Conservatory at the University of Chattanooga in 1963. She received a Maclellan Foundation Scholarship to study piano and harpsichord with Friedrich Wührer and Hedwig Bilgram at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, Germany. With fellowships from the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, she remained in Munich for three years, and was awarded the Diploma Meisterklasse. She earned a Master of Music degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison studying with Paul Badura-Skoda and Rudy Kolisch, on a University Fellowship. After teaching at Cornell College in Iowa, she moved to New York City where she coached new keyboard music with pianist Hilde Somer.

In 1971 she was awarded first prize in the Gaudeamus Competition for Interpreters of New Music at Rotterdam, and began her international career as a performer of contemporary music. She recorded many programs of new music, her own and others, at broadcasting stations in Germany, Holland, Italy and Yugoslavia, and appeared in numerous festivals, including the Como Festival and Pro Musica Nova Bremen, and was invited to celebrate John Cage's 60th birthday by performing his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra with the Orchestra at the Hague. She gave the first performance in Europe of her own music at the Gaudeamus Composers Week in Holland in 1972, a composition called "Hands and Lights" for piano strings with photocell activated switches and flashlights beamed across the interior of a grand piano.

Sorrel Hays has written music for films, including for Turner Broadcasting, and is herself a filmmaker. Her film "M.O.M. 'N P.O.P." (Music Only Music, Piano Only Piano) was a critical hit at Pro Musica Nova Bremen Festival, and has been shown frequently in the United States, including at the National Womens Studies Conference. The audio video painting "Flowing Quilt" made in association with Marilyn Ries has been exhibited in various film festivals, including the Baton Rouge Revel. Other films include "C.D., The Ritual of Civil Disobedience", which was shown at the National Video Festival and in a touring exhibit of the American Film Institute. She directed and composed music for the films "House" and "Pill Woo", in collaboration with videographer Barbara Kristaponis, which were part of her "Sound Shadows" concert at the Whitney Museum Acoustica Festival in 1990. "House" was shown at the Women in the Director's Chair Festival in Chicago and on the Independent Film Series of Channel Thirteen in New York City.