Sorrel Hays’s music was featured in festivals and exhibitions in the U.S, Europe, Australia and Africa. including the 1996 Copenhagen Festival, the New Music America Express to Hartford, the Kassel Dokumenta, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Spoleto Charleston.

She composed Sound Shadows for didjeridu, oboe, video, electronic keyboard and dancer as percussionist, that opened the Whitney Museum’s first Audio Art Festival 1990. The film House, part of Sound Shadows concert, was shown at Women in the Director’s Chair Festival in Chicago, and on the Independent Focus series of Channel 13 in New York City.

"Cumulative ecstasy....contrapuntal/improv tour de force" said the Village Voice, about Take A Back Country Road, recorded live at Experimental Intermedia with Sorrel Hays performing on synthesizer keyboard and electronic saxophone, on the CD “Dreaming the World” from New World Records.

Sorrel Hays produced a number of works especially for the medium of radio, exploring audio in a different way than live performance, with the ability to combine text, instrumental and vocal music with sound effects and aural ambiances. As a consequence, many of Hays's works from 1980-2000 originated in broadcast programs. Echo U.S. Continental, the third in her radio series exploring aural space, aired over American public radio in 1991. 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.

Hays’s spoof on American busyness Etwas Tun/Something (To Do) Doing, for 15 actors and  scat singer Janet Lawson, premiered in 1984 at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne and was exhibited in the Whitney Museum’s first audio art show in 1990. Something (To Do) Doing is an acoustic collage based on Hays's poem "Something (To Do) Doing", and her understanding of  Gertrude Stein's definition of an American materialism based not on possession but on constant activity.

Hays worked with Turkish composer and producer Ilhan Mimaroglu on albums of contemporary music for the Finnadar/Atlantic label, recording her “Sunday Nights” and his "Rosa" for piano solo, and her landmark Henry Cowell piano album. 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 of Hays, Cowell and Mimaroglu.

Hays is considered one of the foremost performers of cluster piano music. Townhall Records reissued the 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. She 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 centennial. Her performance in the Berkeley Festival is found on a New Albion CD.

The first years of the 21st century Hays performed in New York City,  with Kristin Norderval in the film with soprano, Reconstruction, at Cornelia St. Café and Debushing America at Roulette; at Roulette with soprano Beth Griffith in Everybody Is; at Café Cornelia with jazz improviser Lenore von Stein, Griffith and Andrew Bolotowsky, flutist, in Das Wetter, Berlin.

 

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