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September 05, 2003

They really put the "moan" in Ceremonial Bugels...

The following innovation would be funny, if it weren’t so disrespectful and thoughtless.

About 1,800 military funeral-eligible service veterans die each day in the United States. As the relevant article on Yahoo! News relates, “Families of honorably discharged veterans are entitled to a two-person uniformed funeral honor guard, the folding and presentation of the U.S. flag and a rendition of taps [sic].” The trouble is, there are only about 500 military buglers are on active duty on any given day. If one assumes that only half of those eligible opt for the military funeral, it still leaves the bereaved over 600 buglers short.

The solution, as suggested by the folks at S & D Consulting, and as approved by the Pentagon, is the Ceremonial Bugle, a digital recording device that plays “Taps” from its inconspicuous vantage point inside the accompanying bugle’s bell. The Ceremonial Bugle even gives the user a five-second grace period between when they activate it and when the music begins, thus giving them time to raise the false instrument to their lips and perpetrate what is at best a deception, and at worst, a farce. The online instructions don’t say anything about puffing out one’s cheeks to complete the illusion, so I’m assuming it’s at each “musician’s” discretion.

The Ceremonial Bugle is the brainchild of Simon Britton, who emigrated here 13 years ago from—wait for it—Britain. Even more interesting than the name/origin homophone is how he’s referred to his new home as the “Untied States” in his brief biographical sidebar. Whether Freudian slip or simple transposition of keystrokes, it’s damned amusing. He also doesn’t see fit to end all sentences with some form of punctuation or to end all sentences with some form of punctuation spell “recording” with two Rs. Then again, the British are our (ah…two Rs there) lingual forbearers, so I suppose I’ve no right to grouse.

Those of the pro-Ceremonial Bugle camp consider it a much better alternative than the playing of Taps on a boombox. Its introduction will “enhance the dignity of military funeral honors,” according to the Pentagon, which lauds the Ceremonial Bugle’s “performance” as “an exceptionally high-quality rendition of taps [sic] that is virtually indistinguishable from a live bugler.”

Virtually indistinguishable, perhaps, to Helen Keller.

When my dad was buried at Riverside National Cemetery in December of 1992, they cranked out Taps on a boom box. And yes, it was a horribly ghetto moment, shouldering its way through the crowd into a larger, far more horrible moment: “Okay…okay…those are my dad’s ashes in that little box that they’re putting in the ground, and—hey! Canned Taps! Dear God, do I laugh? Do I cry? Thanks for being there for me in my time of need, Sony. Oh, how an MC Hammer B-side would ease Death’s barbed handiwork!”

However, as lame of a gesture as it was to play Taps on a boom box, I would have been nothing short of aghast if the cemetery representative had hoisted the boom box up to his lips and pretended that we’d all fallen into some Kafkaesque world in which any random object was just waiting to unleash its latent buglitude. Hundreds of times a day, some random guy is going to tromp out to a military funeral and fake his way through Taps.

I don’t know whether this is SNAFU or FUBAR, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least one of the two…

The military might well be short of buglers, but one does not need to be an accomplished musician to play Taps. Observe:

As shown above, Taps is all of eight bars long. There are only 24 notes—nine Gs, eight Cs, six Es, and one G sitting atop the staff just to give it some sort of arc—and the second, fifth, and seventh measures are use an identical dotted half/dotted quarter/eighth rhythm.

When I was in fifth grade, I took clarinet lessons for a month or two. My interest waned, and I stopped, but before I did, I had taught myself how to play "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" and "When the Saints Go Marching In". One can, after all, only honk out the prescribed “Hot Cross Buns” so many times before looking for jazzier alternatives.

But I digress. “Hot Cross Buns,” which was too simple to hold the attention of this fifth-grade musical newbie, repeats three different notes. Taps only repeats four. I don’t have “Hot Cross Buns” in front of me, but I’d assume by virtue of the notes that it’s five measures long. Taps is only three measures longer than that.

The military has hundreds of thousands of men and women at its disposal. If it can order them to die during post-invasion nation-building, I’m sure it has the authority to order some of them to learn Taps.

No, I take that back. They all need to learn Taps. That’s the new military standard, when I’m in charge: If you can’t play Taps, you don’t get a gun. Or you do get a gun, but it’s fitted with a Ceremonial Bullet—a tiny digital recording device that fits inside the muzzle of a gun and plays “an exceptionally high-quality rendition” of gunfire.

[Note to S & D Consulting: A) I’m joking, unless the Pentagon wants to use it—in which case, B) I thought of it first.]

In the midst of my indignation, I almost forgot to mention the financial angle. Each Ceremonial Bugle runs $525. That’s right. The military will be paying over half a grand a pop for these musical one-trick ponies. The website does assert that the Ceremonial Bugles are real bugles, and can be played as such when the insert is removed. However, they don’t give any of the sorts of specifics (or even generalities) that I would expect a musician to want to know about an instrument before forking out $525. Considering that they’re not meant to be played, I don’t hold out any high hopes regarding the Ceremonial Bugle’s workmanship. On eBay right now, the most expensive bugle—intended for actual musical use, one presumes—was going for $300, and the prices plummet from there. You do the math.

Of course, it would be petty of me to bash the Ceremonial Bugle if I didn’t offer a better solution to the legitimate bugler shortage. Military funeral bugler Jari Villanueva (no known relation to my girlfriend, but from whom I appropriated the Taps sheet music above) suggests the following on his website:

“If you are interested providing the service of sounding Taps at a funeral, there are several ways you can get involved. One is an organization called Bugles Across America. Headquartered in Chicago and founded by Marine veteran Tom Day, this group is trying to provide a much needed service to deceased veterans by creating a network of buglers.

”You may also alert your local VFW and American Legion Posts and local funeral homes that you are willing to perform at funerals, or contact your state National Guard office and find out if they have a need for civilian contract buglers for ceremonies. Many buglers and professional trumpeters are willing to sound Taps and can be hired to do this duty.”

Remember, kids: Just say no to fake foreign funerary flugelhorns!

Posted by patrick at September 5, 2003 06:34 AM

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Posted by: Catherine Burr at October 7, 2003 03:19 PM

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