Ashokan Farewell

Composed in 1982 by Jay Ungar, this waltz gained widespread recognition as the theme for Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War. It was originally written to mark the end of a summer at Ashokan music and dance camp in New York. In “The Waltz Book”, Ungar is quoted as saying, “So one morning I picked up my fiddle and started playing the saddest lament I could come up with as a way of saying goodbye to that summer.”