Day 29-West of the Sun (2012)—Michael Ippolito
June 29, 2025
Recording:
Yesterday, we stepped inside the musical portrayal of anxiety and depression with Unquiet Hours. Today, we go even further, into madness, with West of the Sun by Michael Ippolito. I first encountered Ippolito’s voice at the 2025 CBDNA conference, when Texas State University performed The Harlequin’s Carnival from Wayward Images. I was immediately intrigued. Once home, I dug into his catalog, only to discover he’s written just four works for wind band. West of the Sun is the only one remotely within our grade level parameters, and even then, the instrumentation stretches the norm, requiring harp, piano, and English horn.
But the music is too compelling to ignore. Even if I don’t have the resources to program it yet, this piece is firmly on my list for the future.
West of the Sun is inspired by a passage from Haruki Murakami’s novel South of the Border, West of the Sun, where a farmer simply walks away from his land, and never stops walking until he dies. Ippolito begins with a bleak and beautiful English horn solo over a low drone, setting the landscape. As the ensemble picks up the theme, dissonant chords begin to scatter across sections, portraying a mind unraveling. A bass clarinet enters alone, a voice of disoriented solitude, and the journey begins.
The music grows darker and more insistent. The ensemble surges forward, pressing westward with relentless persistence. At the height of the piece, the texture erupts into chaos, raw, pounding, and unrelenting. The “madness chords” return in a fragmented carousel, cycling through the ensemble, signaling the end. Harp and piano offer a final bridge to the last thread of life: a solitary flute, fading into unresolved silence.
Ippolito’s portrayal of descent is vivid and emotional. The persistent motion, the tension, the fragmentation, it all mirrors the journey of a man slowly overtaken by madness. I heard echoes of John Corigliano’s Circus Maximus in these textures, particularly the channel-surfing movement, dissonance that flickers like fractured thoughts. After spending time with this music, one thing is clear: we need more wind band works from Michael Ippolito.