Ungar also isn’t used to describing the song as a hit. “It has something about it that sounds like you’ve heard it before, and yet it’s strangely different,” he said. Ungar said he has trouble describing “Ashokan Farewell” in a word or two. He also hosts a live music show on an Albany, N.Y., radio station. When he’s not performing with Fiddle Fever, he and Mason join other musicians to perform in concert, at dances or as studio musicians for filmmakers such as Burns. Ungar, who lives with Mason and his 14-year-old daughter, Ruth, was born in the Bronx and started playing the violin at age 7. During the war, over one million soldiers received care in Union military hospitals, and perhaps a similar number in. I was actually in tears when I composed it.” By war’s end, there were 204 Union general hospitals with 136,894 beds. “I was feeling very sad from coming down from this wonderful experience and I started to express it musically, and this is the tune that resulted. “It’s difficult sometimes when these programs end to go back to the world of automobiles and telephones,” he said. He and Mason run a music-and-dance camp in the Catskills each summer at a place called the Ashokan Field Campus, which is owned by the State University of New York.
Ungar, 44, composed the song in a couple of hours early one morning in 1982. The version of the song that introduces each chapter of “The Civil War” is taken straight from the “Waltz of the Wind” album, but Ungar and his friends also played variations of the song and other music for the series. “It contains all of the tragedy and bittersweetness that the Civil War speaks to us.” When he listened to “Ashokan Farewell,” Burns said he knew “it would be a fantastic piece of music for ‘The Civil War,’ ” a five-year project that Burns was then just beginning to plan. Fiddle Fever is an occasional band that includes Ungar, Mason and Russ Barenberg, among others. The song previously was available on a 1984 album called “Waltz of the Wind,” performed by a group named Fiddle Fever and distributed by Flying Fish Records. (Ungar said he originally got $4,500 from Burns’ production company for use of the song.) On the same date, radio stations will get a single of “Ashokan Farewell,” and Warner’s publishing unit is preparing the sheet music for mass distribution. Because of the demand, Warner Communications’ Elektra Nonesuch label plans to release the soundtrack of “The Civil War,” including “Ashokan Farewell” and 27 other songs, on Wednesday. It likely will also make him much wealthier.
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