According to this New York Times article, a group called the National Anthem Project is touring the country to try to re-teach Americans the lyrics and history of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Dismayed by a Harris Poll that showed that 61 percent of Americans did not know all the words to our national anthem, a collection of music teachers organized the effort, with corporate sponsorship by Jeep and support from the Girl Scouts of America, Disney, the NBA, the NFL, and others.
Currently in Dallas, Texas, the tour will be visiting Little Rock, Nashville, and Indianapolis in the next few weeks. You can sing the anthem at the event to try to win a scholarship for your local school's music program and a chance to participate at the finale in Washington D.C.
There have been earnest attempts to drop the song as the anthem, and replace it with something more benign, like "America the Beautiful." A major problem with "The Star-Spangled Banner," experts say, is that it is all but unsingable.
Steven Blier, a vocal coach at the Juilliard School, rattled off four reasons: "It's rangy, it has that legato phrase on a high note, the climax ends on a high note with a bad vowel, and the word setting is bad at some crucial spots." The song's lowest note, at the word "say" in the first line, is an octave and a half below its highest notes, at "red glare" and "free" toward the end.
So, paradoxically, the song may arouse feelings of humiliation and embarrassment rather than pride. "It's an awkward song to ask untrained people to belt out," Mr. Blier said.
In related news, Dr. Ed Siegel of Solano Beach, California is on a one-man crusade to have the Star-Spangled Banner sung in a lower key, G minor, when audiences are asked to sing along. According to Dr. Siegel, most people cannot hit the high notes in the song at its current designation of B flat major.From an earlier New York Times article:
[Siegel] claims that ''The Star Spangled Banner'' has contributed to a nationwide decrease in singing, because Americans are routinely embarrassed by how badly they sound hollering it out. ''This has caused a form of post-traumatic stress disorder in our culture,'' he says. ''People freak when asked to sing.''
Of course, changing the song's key doesn't fix its absurdly wide range, and the new lows will be too low for some. ''People can mumble those parts if necessary,'' Siegel says. ''But everyone should be able to hit the high notes -- that's where it gets exciting.''
