I know…it’s not a Celtic tune. I happen to really love it alot though. But, I had a problem with the sheet music…it’s written for fiddle! This makes it troublsome to play on whistle because you can’t play it through it’s full range. So after a little messing around…I figured out how to play it in it’s full range on whistle and I wrote it down. I changed it from the key of D to the key of G. Now, I’ve been playing it on my C whistle but I took the original music in D and wrote a harmony part from it that I can play on my F whistle! It also sounds really nice playing the melody on a low D and the harmony on a low G. I’ve never done this before and it seems to be successful.
So here is the sheet music I wrote for Ashokan Farewell. The grace notes I wrote in are merely suggestions that seem to work. I would like any advice you might have on improving the harmony(if any). And, chord suggestions would be nice.
Try it on an A whistle. You’ll be able to play it in-key (D) with only two bent notes: 1) the g-nats by the customary cross-fingering (c-nat on a D), and 2) a lone note c-nat (bent by half-holing the 2nd bottom hole).
I have a version I transcribed for whistle, with everything below D transposed up an octave. If you PM with an email address you can accept attachements at, I can scan it to pfd and fire it off.
However, it’s moving weekend, so service is unlikely to be instant.
That whole “transposing up an octave” is why I re-wrote it. The tune really loses it’s depth of emotion when you do that. By changing the key altogether you can play it properly on a whistle. It might tick off a picky fiddler though…lol!
That’s a wonderful tune. Except for one low C note, it works fine on a D whistle. That one note is what gave me the idea to make a D+ whistle, which has the low C.
Jay Ungar, who wrote that tune, lives about an hour and a half away from where I do and runs the Ashokan Fiddle Camp which gave the tune it’s name. He holds open sessions on the first Wed of the month down near Woodstock NY. I went once and had a great time, but haven’t done it again since I’ve been in nursing school. It is definitely one thing I plan on doing again once I graduate.
‘Ashokan Farewell’ is to Jay as ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ is to Arlo.
It’s kind of like doing ‘Phantom of the Opera’ for twenty years straight on Broadway. They’re both very gracious about it, though. It’s hard not to love that tune.
Not going to be much help but this tune is quite doable on a keyless D flute, starting the tune on bottom D. There’s an F-nat and high C# and a couple of octave shifts but very manageable.
Jason, could you post the music in G after its been reviewed to your satisfaction? I have a NAF in G on which I can play an octave+2, and it’s mellow voice would suit the song very well I think.
S1mon, could you post your transposition in D? Got a High and a Low and would love to try it in both ('specially the Low).
The original notes I found in D are on thesession.org. Turns out there wasn’t a scanner at my work so I’m waiting for a friend to scan and email it to me. If anyone knows of a free music writing program… I can redo it again electronically(I saved my notes/rough draft).
It’s not in a postable format–what I have is on paper. I could turn it into a pdf easily enough, but not into text.
My version sounds good if you’re playing with fiddles, etc, (it also has the original version) but the point above about the tune not sounding right without both the lows and the highs is correct.
~~
However, transposing into another key is a bit of a problem, too, Even in D, that third octave d’’ is a stretch, and transposing the whole tune up to get the low notes onto a whistle would send it well into the third octave, a place where whistles don’t sound good, IMO.
Now if one of you wouldn’t mind a quick lesson in ABC format…
The capital letters are 1st octave, the lower case second and the c’ inthe second line is third..right?
The numbers are a measure of how long to hold the note, I assume, but I’m afraid I don’t have a clue what the ‘(’ in the first and second lines stands for, nor the exclamation points at the ends, or even the " " around the Capital letters beginning each measure.
'Course, the hubby and young’uns will be happy to tell you I’m pretty clueless as a rule!
Yes! Capital letters are 1st octave, lower case second, and c’ is 3rd octave. In ABC notation, the length of the notes are determined by the L: field. In the tune, you will see L: 1/8. This means that the default length of each note in the tune is an eighth note. So, e is a single eighth note. The numbers following a letter are multipliers, so e2 is (2 x 1/8 = 1/4) and so on. e/2 is (1/8 / 2 = 1/16 ). All very nice and neat and orderly.
(3Bcd indicates a triplet.
Exclamation points tell your music notation programs to start a new line. In the above tune, I want my music to display 4 measures per line. It’s just for ease of readabilty and entirely optional.
“G” in the tune indicates a chord which is displayed above the tune. You can put chords any where you want in the tune, depending on your own taste and discretion. The presence of chords in the tune is entirely optional also. I usually leave them out so backers can use their own discretion.
And that’s all I know about ABC notation, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it. Hope this helps!
