Dorothy Hindman

Dorothy Hindman’s music is unique and multilayered, revealing deep organization on every level. Elements of her personal style include economy of materials: most works show intense extension and development of a single idea to create highly complex organic structures. She favors symmetrical harmonies and consonance, and uses timbre as a structural element. Form arises from the material itself, with juxtaposition, fragmentation and combination serving to prolong moods throughout a work. Driving, motoric rhythms contribute immediate surface impact to her music, inviting the listener to discover deeper layers beneath on each successive hearing.Hindman has stated:I write concert music; music that has dramatic elements that must be seen; music that loses something when translated to compact disc.Hindman’s work often deals with the history of places, and how that history is distorted through the lens of contemporary individual perception. It is an internal understanding or misunderstanding of history, a modern, perhaps inappropriate response to a classic or past event. Some works (Monumenti, centro) explore the relationship of the modern individual to the physical and artistic remains of past civilizations. More recent works (Tapping the Furnace; Nine Churches) focus on the cultural, social and economic legacies of industrialization, slavery and racist policies in the New South.Her work is often autobiographical (Needlepoint, Magic City, Seconds, Time Management, Taut, Setting Century), responding in structural ways to events as they unfold and affect her work. Metric schemes correspond to meaningful numeric patterns such as telephone numbers; harmonic structures may be based upon names, dates, places; emotional levels are subtle, complex, and varied within a single work as in life.Her work is perceptually based in the individual (Drift, Jerusalem Windows, Monumenti), informed by her own phenomenological investigations of how music functions. There is often, as with history, a presentation of incomplete ideas, which are intended to be completed in the mind of the listener. It is a language of connotations; within each piece a new syntax is fully established to allow the perceptive, active listener to respond to or to complete fragmentary statements, which the composer in turn comments upon, verifies or denies later in the work. There is deliberate engagement of the listener, a demand upon one’s attention which is rewarded through correspondence.Her work deals with profundity and how musical meanings are inevitably cast even within abstract musical language. With the understanding that meaning is firmly seated within the individual, there are always a number of underlying meanings imbedded in Hindman’s work, any of which are open to the perceptive listener to unravel or to construe.Hindman states:My work has been guided by my study of Husserlian phenomenology: I spend a lot of time thinking about what I am thinking / hearing / experiencing at any given point in one of my pieces, and thus what a given listener (never limited or clearly defined) might be thinking / hearing / experiencing.I enjoy directing the path of that listener (myself?) through musical possibilities, trying to hold their attention always, and surprising them with unimagined avenues that still seem right. a {color:CC9900 !important; text-decoration:none !important; text-transform:none !important; font-weight:normal !important; font-style:normal !important;} a:hover {color:FFCC00 !important; text-decoration:none !important; text-transform:none !important; font-weight:normal !important; font-style:normal !important;} img {border:0px;}