Subject: RE: Question: Ashokan Farewell
From:
Date: 30 Jan 99 - 04:32 PM
For what it's worth, I've heard Jay say that he had this tune running around in his head, and that it has similarities to other tunes that he'd been playing in similar idiom, so it's no wonder that it sounds like an old trad. tune. I believe he's also said that his creative imagination may have put the tune together [or maybe it put itself together in his creative ear] from bits of other, similar old-style waltzes running around in his head from his immersion in traditional music, but didn't lift the tune itself. (My paraphrase of his thought as I understood it.)
I'm sure he composed it himself -- the collective unconscious/subconscious ear is a powerful directing force when a musician doodles around a lot on his/her accustomed instrument in a particular familiar genre (it's part of the _play_ in "playing"), steeping like tea, seeping like -- oops, I'm getting tangled in a metaphor/simile swamp -- anyway, it's easy to think while doodling that one is coming up with a new tune and then later realize that it feels SO RIGHT! so resonant, because it's really _almost_ that other tune you loved so well, or contains partial phrases thereof that grab you and won't leave you alone.
In any case, Ash.F. is a gorgeous tune, one that can endure on its own and become part of the trad. body of Celtic-Anglo-Amer. music, as is happening quickly in this case. Yes, the Mark O'Connor/Pinchas Zuckerman rendition is interesting, awesome in its way, but I think the definitive versions are any of the varieties played by Jay Ungar himself, and by Jay and Molly together, and secondarily by any that he's played with other musicians. There's a straightforwardness in his playing of it that lets the beauty shine thru, that sometimes gets osbcured by overkill (or sometimes underkill) in other musicians' interpretations of it.
I think Jay's also said that he composed the tune (or it composed itself in him) before he used it at the final gathering of that particular week's camp at Ashokan, and then after he was inspired to play it as a final waltz for -- was it Northern Week? -- because of its poignancy, he began calling it Ashokan Farewell. And I think Ken Burns said, in interviews about the making of the Civil War series for PBS, that he'd attended Northern Week at Fiddle & Dance Camp, heard Jay play the tune, felt it fit perfectly with the spirit of the older style of music as he (Ken) was putting together the documentary, and asked Jay (and Molly, and Jacqueline Schwab) to play it in that series, for which it became a kind of theme song, being used in various places thruout the film when a particular degree of poignancy was in the forefront (again, my wording for their statements).
Incidentally, as a folklorist, I read the folklore of the folklore in this discussion with fascination and a touch of gentle amusement. (Like tracing the etymology of "sparrowgrass" for "asparagus.") I doubt that the Algonquian "Ashokan" in the name of the Ashokan Reservoir (near the Kingston/Woodstock area of NY State, sort of in the Catskills) -- and hence the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY (State Univ. of NY), which is where I believe Jay and Molly hold the Fiddle & Dance Camps in the summer, and several weekends thruout the year (e.g., Hallowe'en and New Year's Eve) (all such occasions aka "Ashokan" for short among the folkie/contradance/swingdance-revival world) -- derives from the Buddhist King Ashoka. (Old-world Indian transmuted to New-world Indian?) (Or maybe we are all closer siblings than we usually think.) I know a couple of Hindu and/or Buddhist guys originally from India named Ashok . . . they claim connection with King Ashok or Ashoka, but not with the NY State Ashokan.
(Thanks, Sandy P., for supplying the Algonquian info.)
(Hey, Bob Clayton ["Folk Songs to Ditch" thread], your sentence structure has nothing on this English major's!)
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sj
