Ashokan Farewell

"Ashokan Farewell" is a piece of music composed by Jay Ungar in 1982. It has served as a goodnight or farewell waltz at the annual Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps run by Ungar and his wife Molly Mason, who gave the tune its name, at the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY New Paltz (now the Ashokan Center) in upstate New York. The tune was later used as the title theme of the 1990 PBS television miniseries The Civil War, as well as the 1991 compilation album Songs of the Civil War.

Background

The piece is a waltz in D major, composed by Jay Ungar in the style of a Scottish lament (e.g., Niel Gow's "Lament for His Second Wife"). Jay Ungar describes the song coming out of "a sense of loss and longing" after the annual Ashokan Music & Dance Camps ended. The most famous arrangement of the piece begins with a solo violin, later accompanied by guitar and upright bass.

Before its use as the television series theme, "Ashokan Farewell" was recorded on Waltz of the Wind, the second album by the band Fiddle Fever. The musicians included Ungar and Mason. It has served as a goodnight or farewell waltz at the annual Ashokan Music & Dance Camps that Ungar and Mason run at the Ashokan Center in the Catskill Mountains of New York.