Morgan Hayes

Summary

‘While we should celebrate difference, there's something about a desire to be different that can be irritating.’

Morgan Hayes is a composer about whom I kept hearing, at first in connection with the release by NMC of a CD of his music. And I grew curious about him when reading an interview that he gave to the pianist Jonathan Powell, published on the NMC website. Although steeped in modernism he acknowledged a strong debt to music of the past and recalled his teenage interest in the ‘mercurial, highly active’ nature of Milton Babbitt's works, in which ‘tonal references can shoot out of an atonal context’. He went on to acknowledge the importance of what he has learned from his principal teacher, Michael Finnissy, by referring to old-fashioned virtues such as practicality and unpretentiousness.

I was particularly struck by his response to Powell's suggestion that his musical style wasn't that of ‘a posturing, crowd-pleasing post-modernist’: he identified a turning point when hearing the pianist John Sweeney improvise for a ballet class (for which he himself was to become a regular accompanist) and for silent movies. He explained:

It may not be the grandest form of music making but I noted that while the source material was identifiable (whether it was Chopin, Latin or Gibbons) the expression was entirely personal – it sounded bang up to date within its pastiche. I certainly preferred it to a lot of ‘contemporary’ music and Keith Jarrett improvisations. A more recent example was when I was listening ‘blindfold’ to an NMC sampler CD where the Robin Holloway Violin Concerto (with its explicit references to the past) leapt out as being every bit as fresh as the works it was flanked by.

All of this seemed to increase my uncertainty about the nature (or natures) of contemporary classical music. And I wasn't much wiser after listening to the pieces on his own CD. They sounded unquestionably ‘contemporary’, in the sense that I felt they couldn't have been written at any time other than now, but not overtly challenging in their modernity. I was interested to know whether they’re typical of the work of a postmodern composer, if there is such a thing.

The following encounter took place in March 2012 at his home, a fourth-floor flat in a red-stuccoed mansion block in north-west London.