Live taps performance becoming rare

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BATH, N.Y. (AP) -- Once the pastor intoned, "May he rest in peace," a Marine Corps honor guard lifted the flag off Thomas Wagner's casket and held it aloft. Right on cue, from an adjacent hilltop at Bath National Cemetery, there rose a stirring bugle call.

Played by an American Legion post chaplain, the Civil War dirge known as taps endures as a final salute to fallen veterans " most of whom, like Mr. Wagner, were warriors long ago.

"For the families of those who served, it adds a beautiful, somber tone, a feeling of finality," said Fran Look, a World War II paratrooper who performs at a dozen funerals each year and played at Mr. Wagner's ceremony.

With an average of 1,800 U.S. veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars dying every day, live renditions of taps at military funerals have become a relative rarity.

The 24-note melody usually is delivered digitally -- via a compact-disc player placed near the grave or, increasingly since 2003, a Pentagon-approved, push-button "ceremonial bugle" that anyone can mimic playing by raising it to his lips.

The armed forces have about 500 musicians who perform taps, but many have been dispatched to the Middle East. A few thousand civilian volunteers in the Bugles Across America group also fill in wherever they can, but there aren't nearly enough buglers to go around.

Now, to spotlight the scarcity and help address it, horn players are planning a dramatic musical performance, called the Echo Taps project.

Stretched across 41 miles between two national cemeteries in rural western New York, hundreds of musicians will play a cascading arrangement of taps on Armed Forces Day, May 21.

"Once the first bugler plays the first three notes, the second bugler will start and then, three notes later, the next," said Les Hampton, a Corning Inc. engineer who served on a Navy destroyer in the Vietnam War.

"If we have a bugler every 10th of a mile, or 410 buglers, the rate of sound traveling through the valley would be 60 miles an hour and last 41 minutes," he said.