Schumann Scholarship in Composition from the Aspen Music Festival and School. Lindsay was the winner of San Francisco chorus Volti’s Choral Arts Laboratory, a commissioning program, resulting in their performance of his Sound Explanations in September 2006. His work The Real Mother Goose won second place nationally in the 2005 SCI/ASCAP Commissioning Competition, which resulted in Coronary Dance of the Destructive Sense for wind ensemble, premiered at the 2006 SCI conference. Also an instrumentalist, Lindsay is a two-time winner of the Seattle Symphony's Gold Medalist Program as oboist, and won an award from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival as piano soloist with an ensemble.

Lindsay is captivated by questions of style synthesis and the reinterpretation of tradition. In Five Piano Etudes after J.S. Bach (the first book of a projected 15 etudes) Lindsay imaginatively illustrates Bach's strong influence on music that has followed. Bach is always present, either by quotation or allusion, like a ground bass over which music of diverse styles from more recent times is conjured. The first etude, for example, interweaves piano figurations ranging from Art Tatum to György Ligeti in a 3-voice texture based on the prelude in C minor, BWV 999.

The Real Mother Goose for coloratura soprano and ten instruments deconstructs the texts of traditional nursery rhymes with an engaging theatricality. But beneath the surface is a seriousness of purpose. His note reads, "the majority of the texts in traditional nursery rhymes were originally subversive songs of political protest, masked to avoid persecution from royalty in Elizabethan England. A brief scan through these fables will, in fact, reveal numerous lessons and scenarios often involving nonsensical, or violent, subject matter." Lindsay supports his soprano with a merry band that includes acoustic guitar, banjo, and an assortment of unconventional percussion instruments.

For still larger forces, Darkness Made Visible is a 9-minute orchestral etude of fusion. At the opening, two thematic ideas-one angular, frenetic, and explosive, the other conservative, predictable in its construction and harkening back to a Romantic bravura-are presented sequentially. The work then starts over, attempting to superimpose one idea onto the other, resulting in a spectral "blowout." The concluding section addresses original themes again, and finds a way to fuse them together element by element, scaling the heights and then ending with a sudden afterthought for bass clarinet and percussion. As with all of Lindsay's music, it is highly unpredictable and very assured.