Hayes, Morgan: Buoy. Rental
Duration: 6 minutes
For flute/piccolo/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, piano, viola and cello
Commissioned by the Brighton Festival for the Composers Ensemble
1st perf: Composers Ensemble, Church of St Nicholas, Brighton, 15 May 1999
Full score and instrumental material
Although the five-minute span of Buoy proceeds for the most part reflectively, it is not without a number of jarring episodes, the most prominent of these being the intrusions of a somewhat unhinged piccolo melody. As if weary of confrontation, the piece eventually sinks into a murky, microtonally inflected viola solo. The title refers by analogy to the role of an unchanging, repeated pitch that acts, throughout the work, as a fixed point of reference for the changing counterpoints around it.
© 1999 Morgan Hayes
Buoy by Morgan Hayes (whose Viscid for 15 players had already caught my attention) is intensely dramatic, a work of gestural, almost tactile images which ends in a strangely beautiful microtonal limbo.
Steve Lomas, classicalsource.com, January 2002