Since then, in a series of ambitious pieces composed for many of Britain’s leading new-music ensembles, Hayes has shaped and extended his musical vision to encompass a diversity of forms and expressive modes within a highly original musical language. For the glutinous aspect of Viscid, Shellac (1997) for piano and orchestra, substituted brightness and verve, echoes of which may be heard in the raw vibrations of Slippage, one of four remarkable pieces composed and premiered in 1999. Though separately conceived, together they amount to a summative statement of Hayes’s still-developing language: languidly floating in Alluvial, with dominant timbres of piccolo and E flat clarinet; unstable and explosive in Divided Nettings; and light and luminous with a streak of obsessive insistency in Buoy. Add to these the blend of unusual colours in Trio (2000) for piano, violin and bass clarinet, and the intriguing ‘mixed double’ of contrabassoon and mandolin with strings in Balustrades (2001), plus the exuberant textual exchanges of two works for flexible orchestration premiered in 2000, Boaz and Dislocated Chorales, and the picture emerges of a composer whose breadth of imagination is a continuing source of fascination and musical discovery.

An accomplished pianist, Hayes has also composed an impressive oeuvre of solo music that brilliantly exploits the instrument’s potential as catalyst and confessional in both intimate and virtuoso manner. Outstanding contemporary soloists including Andrew Ball, Stephen Gutman, Rolf Hind, Sarah Nicolls, Ian Pace and Jonathan Powell have each identified with facets of its wit, humour, nostalgia and playful energy, qualities also richly present in the piano parts of two vocal works, No Glints in It (2000) written for soprano Loré Lixenberg, and My Compass (2001), for soprano Sarah Leonard. An admirer of the quixotic artistry of Glenn Gould, not least his recording of the Goldberg Variations, Hayes in several keyboard works has turned to the music of Bach and that of other baroque masters including Rameau (in Le Lardon) and Purcell (in Weaving) as source-material for creative fission. This impulse for exchange and interchange with a strongly contrasting musical presence relates, in turn, to Hayes’s fascination with the art of keyboard improvisation, and its extension to the applied musics of stage, dance and film.

As 2001–2002 Leverhulme Composer-in-Residence at the Purcell School, Hayes’s major achievement was the ‘Tatewalks’ project, based on Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and involving young composers in collaboration with the distinguished photographer Malcolm Crowthers and with the London Sinfonietta, who featured the work in the 2002 ‘State of the Nation’ festival. In a continuing engagement with the visual arts, Hayes also provided music for the exhibition Jacqueline Morreau: Reflections on Water Music at the Morley Gallery in summer 2003 and further extended his range of reference with an iridescent transcription of Squarepusher’s Port Rhombus for the South Bank Centre’s ‘Ether Festival’ in March of that year.

Meanwhile, the successful premieres and recordings of the clarinet concerto Dark Room by Mark van de Wiel and the London Sinfonietta at the 2003 Bath Festival, and the violin-and-piano duo Opera, inspired by Italian director Dario Argento’s giallo classic of that name and written for Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea, signalled a new phase in the composer’s creative development. Lute Stop for solo piano was premiered by Sarah Nicolls in December 2003 as part of the BMIC’s ‘Cutting Edge’ season, and in August 2005, at the BBC Promenade Concerts, the composer’s debut orchestral work Strip, played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Joseph Swensen, was heard for the first time. Two other major works were heard the following year: the Violin Concerto, a Birmingham Contemporary Music Group ‘Sound Investment’ commission, premiered by the young Japanese soloist Keisuke Okazaki, and Senedd Sound, specially written for outdoor performance at Richard Rogers’ new Welsh Assembly building in Cardiff, as the focus of the 2006 ‘Urban Legacies’ conference.

The creative use of space as an element of musical form – in this case the unique interior of Christ Church, Spitalfields – was the inspiration for Original Version, premiered in June 2007. The same month saw Hayes’s first contribution to the distinctively English medium of the string orchestra, with Futurist Manifesto, commissioned by the Munich Chamber Orchestra. With Dances on a Ground, commissioned by the Smith Quartet and premiered by them at the Artrix, Bromsgrove in February 2009, Hayes also engaged with a time-honoured medium of the classical string quartet through the no less venerable technique of the ostinato bass, taking a personal view of both that was transformed again in the arrangement made subsequently for the Composers Ensemble. And in Völklinger Hütte, impressions of the famous German steel foundry and UNESCO world heritage site were distilled into the musical essence of a hefty one-movement structure for piano trio given its first performance by the Fidelio Trio in February 2010.

Meanwhile, to the wry social observations of his earlier vocal works, the ironical musical responses to the texts of the operatic scena Shirley and Jane, based on the career of Dame Shirley Porter, produced while Hayes was composer-in-association with Music Theatre Wales in 2008, and Dictionary of London, his contribution to the NMC Songbook of 2009, added notes of satire and social comment. Satire as a comic mode subsumed within the autonomous workings of instrumental form was the subject of the Endymion-commissioned Shatner’s Bassoon of 2009. And as if emboldened by his fresh encounter with words, Hayes answered the challenge of setting Latin a cappella in E Vesuvio Monte, an account of the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 as related by Pliny the Younger, and premiered by EXAUDI at the 2010 Aldeburgh Festival.

The music of Morgan Hayes has been included in a number of recorded collections, and a CD devoted exclusively to his music, featuring the Violin Concerto, Port Rhombus, Slippage, and instrumental music for solo violin and for piano, was released on the NMC label (NMC D163) in October 2011.

© Stainer & Bell Ltd