Ungar, Ashokan Farewell
I like to choose something American when the Fourth of July rolls around, and this year I decided on a folk tune that has achieved a sort of iconic status. It’s not a true folk song because it’s newly composed and we have the composer’s original composition in writing.
Jay Ungar composed Ashokan Farewell in 1982. He says that the song was inspired by the closing of the annual Ashokan Fiddle and Dance Camp that Ungar and his wife, Molly Mason, ran at SUNY New Paltz in Upstate New York. Ken Burns took the music as the theme for his 1990 television series The Civil War. Music of the Civil War period comprised all of the other music in the series, and many people quite naturally assumed that Ashokan Farewell came from that period as well. It has the flavor of that time and place, although it is written in the style of a Scottish lament.
The melody is striking, and this owes significantly to features that are not typical of folk tunes. Its wide melodic range of two octaves exceeds the typical vocal range. (Amateur singers complain about the range of the Star-Spangled Banner with its range of a twelfth or about three-fourths that of Ashokan Farewell.) Folk songs tend to be easy to sing and well within an amateur’s range. And instead of progressing primarily stepwise (to adjacent notes) as a folk song might, the melody outlines arpeggios and contains octave leaps. These traits make it far better suited to instruments than to the voice.
The Wikipedia entry suggests that it fits the Civil War mold because of its many similarities with Stephen Foster’s Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground. Having spent most of my professional life as a music theorist and copyright attorney, I can’t let that contention go unchallenged. Any similarities, such as the octave leap, are anecdotal and unsubstantial, and the assertion is unfair to Ungar.
Ungar has noted the potential irony of this Civil War theme song being written in the form of a Scottish lament by a Jew from the Bronx, but rightly concludes that it makes sense in the context of our American heritage.
Wow, that was a perfect 4th of July selection! Were there ever any lyrics to this song?
I kept expecting one of the instrumentalists to burst forth with a verse or two! However, the violin did all the singing, close as it is to the human voice! Thanks!