The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: For Memorial Day – and as a tribute to all veterans — here is the long and moving history of “Taps” from NPR.

By Jacob Stockinger

In past years, I have posted works of classical music that pay tribute to veterans, their families and those whose suffering we recall and remember on Memorial Day. (Below is a photo of Arlington National Cemetery.)

Here is a link to the Memorial Day posting for 2011:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/

Here are links to two Memorial Day postings for 2010:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/classical-music-poll-what-classical-music-is-best-to-celebrate-memorial-day/

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2010/05/

In addition, the National Memorial Day Concert – with hosts Joe Mantegna and Gary Sinise — that was broadcast LIVE last night (Sunday) from the west lawn of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Wisconsin Public Television will get an encore presentation tonight at 10:30 p.m. The National Symphony Orchestra will take part. It performs Samuel Barber‘s “Adagio for Strings,” among other works.

Here are links to information about that TV broadcast:

http://www.pbs.org/memorialdayconcert/concert/

http://wptschedule.org/schedulenow.php?epid=220691&stime=2012-05-28

But this year I happened upon something else: An extraordinary history on NPR of the moving, emotionally intense bugle call TAPS that will be played many times in many places today.

It is both a personal story of a longtime military bugler for Arlington National Cemetery and a history of a piece of music that spans 150 years, and wears and conflicts going back to the Civil War and more recently the assassination of JFK.

Here is a link to the story:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2012/05/18/152939191/150-years-of-taps

But I am also not ignoring classical music. If I recall correctly, Leonard Bernstein once commented on how Beethoven used various bugle calls in his Symphony No. 3, the famed “Eroica” that also has a movement that is a “Funeral March for a Hero.” (Part of the technical explanation, I seem to recall, is that the symphony is written in the key of E-flat, which is often the key for brass and especially horns and trumpets.)  

But I am still interested in what piece of classical music you would choose to listen to on Memorial Day as a tribute to veterans. Leave a comment and let us know.