Selected Recordings

Hayden's complete solo piano music 'Becomings' performed by Ian Pace has been released by Métier (Divine Art Recordings)

A new album of Sam Hayden's complete works for solo piano, performed by Ian Pace has been released by Métier (Divine Art Recordings) in November 2020.

A preview track of Becomings I is available here.

The album order page is here.

Click here for more information.

See Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music review here.

See MusicWeb International review here.

Please contact Sam Hayden here if you wish to buy a physical CD direct from the composer.

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Hayden Album 'Substratum' reviewed in Gramophone by Pwyll ap Siôn (1/3/20)

See review in Gramophone by Pwyll ap Siôn (1/3/2020): here.

My first introduction to Sam Hayden’s music was in the back room of a low ceilinged bar at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival sometime in the late 1990s, where [rout] – the ensemble he established with fellow composers Paul Newland and Paul Whitty – blew away the cobwebs that clung to contemporary music with performances that were high in physical intensity and volume.

Two of the works featured on this disc, Relative Autonomy and Substratum, capture some of the pressurised energy of that concert. Premiered at the Proms in 2007, Substratum for large orchestra kicks off with fierce explosions of sound, endlessly remoulded and reshaped across a 25 minute timespan in what Hayden has described as the ‘proliferation of self-similar materials’. The work brings to mind the low-lying, densely shifting textures of Birtwistle’s Earth Dances and slowly evolving contours of Finnissy’s Red Earth, although the music’s sonic imprint is unmistakably Hayden’s own.

By contrast, an almost brittle pointillism characterises Relative Autonomy for 16 players – persistent, concentrated bursts often high up in the instruments’ registers that continually threatening to crack open its surface. The idea is developed still further in the 30 minute, seven-movement Transience for string quartet, completed in 2014. Dedicated to Hayden’s teacher, Jonathan Harvey, the work displays what Björn Heile refers to in an excellent set of booklet notes as the strongly gestural qualities that manifest themselves, where ‘gesture’ means not only the movements of the musicians themselves but also the musical shapes they produce. Quatuor Diotima manage this very well, producing a highly sculpted and crafted performance. These gestures take on more percussive forms on the bonus track Die Abkehr, available as a free download via NMC’s online store.

While Hayden’s aesthetic often generates highly animated, complex and concentrated structures, subdued moments also filter through in the string quartet, recalling earlier, more spectral-inspired works such as Presence/absence and Partners in Psychopathology: proof, perhaps, that the gestural substrata revealed in these works still hold future riches for the composer to mine.

Pwyll ap Siôn

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Hayden's schismatics selected for HCMF 2012 sampler

Sam Hayden's schismatics (2007, rev. 2010) for electric violin and computer, performed by violinist Mieko Kanno and himself on computer, has been selected by Graham McKenzie, Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, to be included on a new HCMF 2012 sampler, available for download from the NMC label.

"...Hayden is at this moment one of the most compelling voices in the European new music scene." (Graham McKenzie, November 2012).


schismatics (part 1)

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NMC Debut Discs: 'presence / absence'

A Hayden Portrait CD (presence/absence) was released in June 2012 as part of the NMC Debut Discs series, including works performed by ELISION (misguided), Trio EKL (system/error), Mieko Kanno (schismatics) and Ensemble Mosaik (presence/absence and Die Modularitäten).

Buy online from NMC

Andrew Clements, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 July 2012: Review
Graham Rickson, theartsdesk.com, Saturday 25 August 2012: Review
Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone: Review

NMC Debut Discs Press Release: Download

misguided (opening) system/error (opening) schismatics (part 1) presence/absence (opening) Die Modularitäten (opening)

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