AMERICAN LAMENT:

"Ashokan Farewell" was not, as both its tune and the miniseries that made it famous would seem to suggest, written in the 19th century. It was written instead at the tail end of the 20th. And it wasn't a Southern waltz; it was created in the style of a Scottish lament--and in celebration of a town, and a reservoir, in upstate New York. By a guy from the Bronx.

In the early 1980s, Jay Ungar and his wife and fellow musician, Molly Mason, were running the Ashokan Camp, a summer arts school specializing in fiddle and dancing, at the Ashokan Field Campus of SUNY New Paltz. Ungar composed the tune--Mason would later give it its resonant name--to commemorate the conclusion of the 1982 session of the camp. Ungar had traveled through Scotland earlier in the summer, he told me, and he wanted to compose a tune in the style of a Scottish lament--something that would capture the sense of sadness that the camp, and all the camaraderie and community and joy it represented to him, would be ending.

He wanted something more celebratory, too: "The tune," he says, "was my attempt to get back to a feeling of connectedness."

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