Jerusalem Windows

Jerusalem Windows

Violin, Cello and Piano
Duration: 11:00

 

 

“Dorothy Hindman’s Jerusalem Windows is a musical embodiment of Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows in the Synagogue at the medical center of Hadassah-Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Like Chagall’s wildly colorful abstractions, Hindman’s work abounds in fragments of color, short melodic cells, overlapping textures and sudden changes of timbre and meter. Brief moments of expansive melody in the strings and sections for prepared piano (with objects placed on or between the instrument’s strings) spice the 2002 score. Hindman succeeds in creating a musical tapestry that parallels the leaping figures and color splashes that dominate Chagall’s vast abstractions. In a superbly detailed performance, pianist Milana Strezeva was a tower of strength in the busy keyboard lines.”
~Lawrence Budmen, “Manhattan Piano Trio offers bracing music by Frost School faculty,” South Florida Classical Review, Thursday, October 17, 2013

Program Notes:

Jerusalem Windows (2002) takes many points of departure from Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows of the same name in the Synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. In twelve windows representing each of the tribes of Israel, Chagall combined religious and natural imagery and smaller images of his hometown of Vitebsk with his trademark strong colors and experimental glasswork techniques developed by Charles Marq to create both intimate and powerful emotion within towering, bold, abstract works. Like the twelve windows, the music has multiple themes (six) that are transformed and fragmented and later juxtaposed experimentally over thirty-six formal sections to create new and unusual colors. The opening theme is developed harmonically in both abstract and more familiarly tonal ways, and Golden Mean proportions are used formally.  Rapidly shifting harmonies, timbres and textures create occasional moments of intimacy within a bold, colorful abstract framework. The music is wild, complex and rich, forcing the listener’s ear to travel over it the way that the eye travels over a Chagall. Jerusalem Windows was commissioned in 2002 by the Alabama Music Teachers Association/Music Teachers National Association, and written for the Chagall Trio.

Premiere: June 6, 2002
Chagall Trio
Music Teachers National Association / Alabama Music Teachers Association Conference
Birmingham, AL
Commissioner: MTNA/AMTA

Recordings: Tightly Wound: Music for Strings, innova 965