Taps Off Subject

[Robin Blankenship]

GENERAL Butterfield, a brigade commander with the II Corps, under Hancock.
"No one like General Butterfield for having a good time!" (unidentified
Union private, marching in Ted Turner's "Gettysburg")
Robin

----- Original Message -----
From: <wogamax@utility.net>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>; <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 12:45 PM
Subject: Re: Taps Off Subject


> ....When the Captain finally reached his own lines, he
> discovered it was actually a Confederate soldier, but the soldier
>  was dead....his own son...He asked the bugler to play a series
> of musical notes he had found on a piece of paper in the pocket of
>  his dead son's uniform......
>
> Kevin,
>
> This is a romantic account of where the melody came from and
> would certainly do justice to the feelings it conjures.  The problem I
> saw with it, however, was that bugles can only reproduce melodies
> of specific intervals and not the entire scale.  Needless to say, the
> odds that a randomly composed piece of music can be played on
> one are slim, unless written by a bugler.
>
> A net search provided a little more information.  The current
> accounts of its past still points to glorious roots, though somewhat
> less dramatic.  It turns out it is an adaptation of a bugle call from
> many decades before the civil war done by a soldier named Daniel
> Adams Butterfield.
>
> http://www.west-point.org/taps/Taps.html
>
> Respectfully Submitted,
> Chris Woodward,  former Bugler
>
>