Hayes, Morgan: Totem for Solo Clarinet in B flat

1st perf: Douglas Mitchell, Clare Hall, Cambridge, 26 October 2002

Morgan Hayes’s Totem, for B flat clarinet, is a short, single melodic line that in its brief duration challenges players of Grades 7 or 8 standard or above to encompass widely contrasted dramatic and lyrical moods within the primitive vision of its title. The composer had no specific ethnological source in mind when composing this piece. Rather, his aim was to suggest the complex rhythms and rituals of tribal life, remote in time from the sophistications of the modern world, but in spirit closer perhaps to our own than we might care to imagine.