Madison Chamber Players
Wind From The Mountain

Sunday, November 16, 2025
7:30 PM Collins Recital Hall
740 University Ave Madison, Wisconsin

About the Program:

During times of change and uncertainty, the arts can offer opportunities for connection, reflection, and shared meaning. Through our music making, we have the opportunity to collaborate, to listen, and to find moments of healing and joy together. Thank you for coming to our performance and for your support of community-oriented music making here in Madison. We hope to see you at another one of our performances soon.

Forward and program notes written by R. Louis Vajda

Dixtuor (1987)
Jean Francaix (1912-1997)

Jean Francaix was a composer who experienced a great deal of success during his career. After beginning his piano studies at a young age with two professional musicians for parents, he was offered a spot in the studio of renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger at the age of ten, and composed his first piece in the same year. Francaix's music gained international recognition around 1936, and he produced a wide catalogue of music including works for ballet, choir, film, and orchestra. Notably, Francaix wrote several pieces for chamber winds which are still quite popular today, including his Sept Dances (1971).

Francaix had close connections with Francis Poulenc and "Les Six" and his compositional language can be best described as Neoclassical, although he himself claimed to not be committed to any particular musical ideology. His writing is witty and charming, and the instrumentation of his Dixtuor provides many opportunities for interplay between the winds and strings. Dixtuor was one of Francaix's last major works, composed between 1986-1987. In typical Neoclassical style, the four movements adhere closely to the traditional forms of Sonata-Allegro, Andante, Scherzo, and a final Allegro.

Blue Glacier Decoy (2018)
Jennifer Jolley (b. 1983)

About Blue Glacier Decoy, Jolley writes:

Last year’s obituary in The New York Times for the modern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown only casually mentioned her debt to the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. It was an unusual characterization for an artist who once told her fellow Washingtonian, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, that “The rain forest was my first art class.”

Indeed the Pacific Northwest’s instruction is found in many of Brown’s work. Her 1970 piece “Floor of the Forest” employs a steel scaffolding to hold a cloth canopy of ropes threaded with colorful used clothing to create a synthetic forest where dancers writhe and wiggle.

Her 1979 piece “Glacial Decoy” is similarly derived from these experiences. In this work Brown and Robert Rauschenberg created fleeting images via gossamer-clad dancers and an ongoing found image slide projection. The mechanical and physical movements become an elegant analog to the glaciers. The images and dancers move and shift forward and back, side or other side, or anywhere in between, like a lateral melt. The fleeting projections become a visual metaphor melting and congealing anew.

I have never been to Olympic National Park, so I followed Brown’s example and combined my own experiences with what I learned from an artist who followed the Hoh River Trail, studied the Hoh Rainforest, and revered the Blue Glacier. We should follow her lead and do the same. We must “give [ourselves] a moment to feel this very mobile sense of how the balance is.”

Wind from the Mountain (1999)
Conni Ellisor (b. 1953)

Conni Ellisor is a composer and violinist who holds composition degrees from Julliard and the University of Denver. As a violinist, Ellisor has served as concertmaster of the Boulder Symphony, first violin of the Athena Quartet, and assistant concertmaster with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, in addition to her work as a top-call session violinist. As a composer, Ellisor has been commissioned by major orchestras including the Nashville Symphony, Colorado Symphony, and Chicago Sinfonietta. The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra commissioned her work A Woman Without Apology in 2024.

Wind from the Mountain was composed in 1999 from a commission by the Denver Brass, and was premiered the same year. When the ensemble commissioned the work, they asked for a piece for "brass and percussion" that represented the state of Colorado, but when she began writing it she realized that it was actually about coping with the loss of her mother to cancer. "When I approached the piece in Colorado, there's those winds that come in the autumn that seem to blow all the old stuff away."

The second movement is a funeral march that begins softly in solo horn and gradually gains energy until a final scream at the end. About this movement she writes: "the second movement is very dark and it's about the place in life where, for me personally, from the diagnosis of cancer (in her mother) to the end, there is no way out. There's no way out; the inevitable will happen; it's relentless…"

The third movement of the work begins violently with the upper and lower voices trading musical blows, but gradually it calms into a final statement of the highland prayer theme from the opening movement.