This almost painfully poignant D-major Celtic waltz became familiar to tens of millions as the musical strand that ran throughout Ken Burns’s landmark documentary series on the American Civil War, sounding so much of a piece with the period music that formed the rest of the soundtrack that most, myself included, assumed it was an artifact of the same era. It sounded melancholy, with a tinge of regret, but also peaceful, contemplative, and even a little hopeful. I imagined it might have been written before the war; or perhaps it was composed some time after, at a remove, maybe about the men returning from battle, grateful to have survived, hopeful about the future, but sure to be haunted forever by all they’d seen, and by the memory of all those who weren’t returning home with them.
It was many years after I’d first heard it that I learned the song’s name, that it was written in 1982 by a Jewish fellow from the Bronx named Jay Ungar, and that it had nothing to do with any sort of war, or homecoming. It was instead a bittersweet last waltz about saying goodbye, maybe just for now, maybe just until next time, but maybe, sadly, forever.
Ashokan is a locale in upstate New York, where Jay Ungar and his wife Molly Mason ran Ashokan Camp, a summer arts school specializing in fiddle and dancing. The final day of the program always featured an evening dance concert, and Ungar wrote Ashokan Farewell to serve as a final “goodnight and farewell” waltz, closing out the season, and capturing what Jay described as the “sense of loss and longing” he always felt when summer ended, and everyone went their separate ways, plunging him into what he called “Post-Ashokan depression syndrome”. As so often seems to happen with talented songwriters, the tune occurred to him spontaneously, one particularly gloomy morning, as if he wasn’t so much composing it as acting as its medium; it poured out of him all at once, as if he was only the instrument being played by some outside spirit communing with his subconscious. It’s a feeling he’d had many times before. As he told a writer for the New Yorker, “I don’t do this consciously. While it’s happening I have the feeling that I’m a channel for something else – that the tune exists somewhere, and it’s coming out of me – so I try not to interfere with it and think too much, because then I lose it”. It ended up sounding, he thought, a bit like a couple of old Scottish airs he knew, Old Mountain Thyme and Margaret Ann Robertson, and it even shared a few notes in the verse with the Star-Spangled Banner, before veering off into an eerily haunting note that magically perfects the melody (the B flat struck first at the 50 second mark below):
When I first heard Ungar’s fiddle linger on that gorgeous note, it gave me goosebumps. Still does.
It was Molly who supplied the title. Later, friend and fellow songwriter Grian MacGregor composed a set of lyrics, which, if you sing along, march in lockstep with the tune in a manner worthy of Hal David:
The sun is sinking low in the sky above Ashokan
The pines and the willows know that soon we will part
There’s a whisper in the wind of promises unspoken
And a love that will always remain in my heart
My thoughts will return to the sound of your laughter
The magic of moving as one
And a time we’ll remember long ever after
The moonlight and music and dancing are done
Ashokan Farewell was first released in the early 1980s by a group calling itself Fiddle Fever, formed by Ungar and Mason, on Waltz of the Wind, an album which doesn’t seem to have made much of a splash. It might have remained an obscure little number known only to a few, but then, lucky for us, somehow Ken Burns got wind of it. The tune played beneath roughly 60 minutes of The Civil War‘s eleven-hour run-time, and was thus gifted to a hugely expanded audience, much as the advertising executives helping Volkswagen flog its convertible Cabrio exposed most of us to Nick Drake’s sublime Pink Moon, and from there to the rest of his ethereal catalog. It makes you wonder what else remains out there, waiting to tug at our heart strings, if only somebody, someday, decides to bring it to our attention.
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I’ll leave this here, in case you haven’t seen the VW ad in a while. It really is a masterpiece of its kind.
the needlefish 