Ashkoan Farewell

Catskill Cultural Center Saved, and Renewed, Thanks to a Fiddler’s Tune.
Read

Many still assume that Mr. Ungar wrote “Ashokan Farewell” with the Civil War in mind. But he wrote it on a September morning in 1982, after the end of his third Ashokan summer music and dance camp on this property, which the State University of New York at New Paltz owned and had used since 1967 as a field campus for environmental education.

“I left on a cloud of utopian euphoria,” Mr. Ungar said of that summer. “You try to keep it alive, but it evaporates.”

The song rose from his melancholy. “With the first three notes I would start crying,” he said. “I was afraid to play it for people because I didn’t know what was going on.”

Mr. Ungar has come to believe that his song, like a traditional hymn, evokes much more than loss. In the mid-1990s, he got an e-mail from a man in Africa who said he was driving in his car when he heard “Ashokan Farewell” on the radio. “He started crying uncontrollably and he had to pull off the road,” Mr. Ungar recalled. “He said that in his culture, after the age of 10, men don’t cry, but he needed to cry.” It is a common reaction. “I’ve gotten hundreds of letters and e-mails from people saying the song figured in a transitional moment in their lives,” he says. “It’s a healing experience.”

That is also what Mr. Ungar hopes the new center will provide. “If you have a great experience here, you take that out with you,” he told the crowd shortly before he offered up his song. “It’s kind of a Ponzi scheme for good.”