...land of the free-YEEEEE!!!Follow

Very few vocalists have the range to hit the harmonic note with full color. Even Whitney lost a little of the color of her sound for that note. Colatura sopranos can do it, but you're right, everyone else ends up screeching a little.

This. x1000.

It's the National Anthem, not the latest pop hit. Trying to vamp it up too much seems...disrepectful to me. Just sing it straight.

Edited, Nov 1st 2009 2:07pm by Ambrya

ARTIE CAN WALK!!!

Knew it was something around that time, since I was in high school when it happened, and it prompted a male classmate to make a rather memorable remark when another classmate did it as an audition piece:

"I could hit that note...if I had pants with deep pockets, and vice grips."

I had assumed the Olympics because I knew she was on that soundtrack from one of the Olympics during my high school years as well.



Well, they do way too much auto-tuning on the show, but it's beyond my understanding why, since a large portion of the cast was recruited off Broadway and has the vocal chops without the auto-tune. My best guess is that they figure if they have to do it for some of the singers, they have to do it with all of them, or that they are trying to make the soundtrack sound studio-polished, thinking more people will buy it that way.

I dunno, I think the American national anthem is due a bit of disrespect. Not because I hate America - although of course, like all Europeans, I do - but because it sounds like ****. Now, I realise I'm throwing rocks in glass houses here. The English national anthem would be quite possibly the worst national anthem in the world, if it didn't annoy the Scots so much. We sing it approximately a hundred percent less, though, which brings me to my main point: what is up with chickens?

I think the American National Anthem is very fitting of it's people, as a whole.

I agree that as a musical composition, it's amateurish at best, and I'm not one to get all misty-eyed when it plays, either out of an excess of patriotism or as a lover of great music (okay, I admit, for a while after 9/11 I did, but those were extreme circumstances.)

However, with ANY national anthem, a modicum of respect should be accorded, because that's just the way people with class behave. You stand up, you doff your hat, if you can't be moved to sing along you at the very least shut your trap, and if you're at an event being broadcast live on national TV, you try not to get caught on camera picking your nose.

At any rate, adding a whole bunch of yodels and grace notes and glissandi--all of which are done in order to make the performance about the performer, rather than about honoring the nation in question--is just tacky.


Edited, Nov 2nd 2009 10:48am by Ambrya

Agreed, with the stipulation that an exception be made for Hendrix.

I'm not sure what this auto-tuning is, but I suspect it's some sort of computer adjuster to make the sung pitch at any given point in time match the actual note it's supposed to be? (i.e. what Britney Spears had to use.)

Yep, pretty much.

I suspect this happens a lot nowadays anyway.

Francis Scott Key did not write a song. He wrote a poem titled "Defense of Baltimore". When the poem was published in The Baltimore Examiner (I thnk that was the name of the paper) on Sept. 20 1814 there was a note under the title "To the tune of ANACREON in HEAVEN" a very popular drinking song of the era.
Who cares how hard it is to hit a note after a few glasses of wine. <grin>

With that said the last verse of the poem is what I cherish.

O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave

Now if the bomb that hit the powder magazine had exploded, the Brits would have taken Fort McHenry, burnt the shipyards of "That nest of Pirates" as Adm. Cockeburne called us and Key wouldn't have had anything to celebrate.

Edited, Nov 2nd 2009 6:09pm by Jonwin