A Bugler's Dream (a repost)

John Scalzi posts about the development of a digital bugle, because the demands for buglers playing "Taps" at military funerals has outstripped the supply of same. I caught wind of this in November of 2002, and here is what I wrote then on the subject.

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Last week I was watching The McLaughlin Group on PBS, a political show that for some reason I've always liked -- especially the Saturday Night Live parodies of it, in which McLaughlin (played by Dana Carvey) would let his commentators get halfway through a sentence and then bark, "WRONG!" before moving on to the next thing.

But there was a fascinating segment, toward the end of the show, on a problem facing the military. Veterans of World War II and Korea are dying at a pretty brisk clip these days, pushing up the number of funerals with full military honors -- but the military only has something like five hundred buglers worldwide, which makes the playing of "Taps" at each funeral a difficult or impossible proposition. The military's solution is to use an electronic doohickey to sound "Taps" while a member of the military holds up a bugle and, well, fake it. I'm thinking, in the event of a funeral where there can be no actual bugler, why not just have a civilian trumpeter play "Taps"?

I played the trumpet in high school and college -- pretty well, too; I actually majored in it my first two years of college before I switched to philosophy -- and I had the high honor of playing "Taps" for several military funerals while I was in high school. They weren't official military funerals, actually; they were done under the auspices of the American Legion, which I'm sure is a different matter requiring a different protocol. But the men being buried on those occasions were veterans or former servicemen, and I was immensely proud to be able to play "Taps" for their funerals -- a small way for me, as a civilian, to pay tribute to the service they had done for their country. If there aren't enough official buglers around, then I suggest that civilian trumpeters are the way to go. I doubt there is a community anywhere in the country where one trumpet player can't be found, and believe me, playing "Taps" for a funeral is a surprisingly moving experience.

I don't know the first thing about the military regulations for such things, but surely they could be changed so that a civilian could sound the call for a departed veteran. At the very least, it seems to me that having a non-military person actually playing "Taps" is preferable to having a military person who can't play the instrument "acting the part" while the call is sounded electronically.

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ADDENDUM: Someone in John's comments thread suggests that "Taps" is really very easy and that someone could be taught to play it in half an hour. Believe me, this is such a wrong-headed suggestion that it's pretty breathtaking. It would probably suffice to reflect what that band sounds like at the very end of The Music Man, the one comprised of kids who have no idea how to play their instruments. The ability to produce a pleasant tone on any wind instrument is the result of lots of practice, and in the case of "Taps", the bugle -- or trumpet -- is required to ascend, with control, into a register that is quite frankly beyond the ability of any beginner. "Taps" may sound easy to play, seeing as how it only uses notes in the C-major arpeggio played very slowly, but believe me, it is not. And I can promise that any family seeing its beloved veteran buried to the strains of "Taps" played by a person who has played the bugle for "half an hour" will not feel honored by the occasion.