AT THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN...

THE VOLUNTEER BUGLERS GIVING 24-NOTE SALUTES FOR THE FALLEN

- STORY: DANNY FREEDMAN / NYT

At the end of a car park in rural Mississippi, US man Matthew Burford blew long warm-up tones from his trumpet into a wall of oaks and sweet gums while a familiar knot formed in his stomach. He had done this a couple of hundred times, but the nerves never failed to flare.

“I think they're getting ready,” Burford said shortly afterwards, walking to his place beside a readied grave in a 198-year-old cemetery.

As a few dozen mourners watched, a member of the US Air Force approached the casket of a 92-year-old veteran and saluted. Then Burford began to play taps, the solemn bugle call that since the 1800s has been used to herald the end of a day and, in this case, the end of a life.

When his final note crescendoed to a finish, it left a chasm of silence.

It was not a perfect rendition — “a little pitchy,” Burford said later, with a quarter note that cracked near the end. But it was unique in a way that some find vastly superior to the alternative.

If Burford had not driven 200km to the cemetery, a recording would have been played instead from a speaker that fits into the bell of a bugle. The device allows taps to be played at every funeral with military honours, as is legally required, but it has also stirred a resistance.

Burford is one of at least 2,500 volunteers who travel to play taps at military funerals, many distressed by the idea of a recording performing the duties. They are tweens and nonagenarians, civilians and veterans. Some are seasoned musicians with an in-demand skill. Others are lapsed players who felt compelled to restart.

“It’s not like I don’t like the recording,” Burford, 49, an adjunct professor who teaches classic literature at Samford University, said a few weeks before the funeral in Columbus, Mississippi. “I just feel like our veterans and our soldiers deserve better.”