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The national anthem: What makes the song special?
Many may not know that despite being performed countless times at sporting events and various celebrations, it can actually be a technically challenging song to sing.
Monday is Star-Spangled Banner Day. Tennessee Tech Professor of Music Dr. Wendy Mullen said that the most challenging part of the song is the voice range it requires.
“How many you notes you have to hit in a scale,” Mullen said. “It is an octave and a half, which is quite a bit for an unprofessional, or non-professional singer I should say. And even for the professional singer, you have to be careful how you pitch it or else you might end up outside the range of your singing ability.”
Mullen said that its close-rhyming words often lead to mistakes by amateurs and professionals alike. She said that the key to performing the song correctly comes from practice and preparation.
Mullen said that although the Star-Spangled Banner poem was written by Francis Scott Key in 1814, the words were not put to music until much later.
“The music actually came from a gentleman’s group in England,” Mullen said. “And they would like to get around and enjoy the evening and drink and sing, and this was like their ‘theme song’, the tune. And somebody actually thought, ‘This matches that tune really well.’ So you can kind of imagine there’s a bunch of people having a great time and they just start to sing and so if they sing the high note really loud, and kind of not beautiful it doesn’t really matter because you’re just having a great time. So I think it was interesting that this tune was chosen for the poetry that Francis Scott Key wrote originally. “
