This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
02/08/2023 08:06 AMFor many, one of the grandest highlights of any sporting event is the performance of the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” before the game begins. For high school teams, this often means merely pressing play on a recording of the anthem. For North Haven High School’s (NHHS) ice hockey team, the anthem is performed by middle schooler Addison Prunier.
Addison, a North Haven Middle School student, has sung the anthem a cappella for each game of the Nighthawks’ schedule this season. Her performances appear to be strokes of good fortune for the Nighthawks; the team is currently 12-1 on the season. While her performances may have brought a touch of good luck to the team, Addison says she doesn’t like to listen to herself.
“I actually don’t like listening to myself, but when I do listen to myself, I hear the words and what they mean,” she says.
Addison has sung for other school sports teams in North Haven, North Branford, Branford, and Quinnipiac University. While her uncle, a music promoter, has helped her land some opportunities, her mother, Michelle, said she’s also benefitted from a more classic method: word-of-mouth.
Addison says she began singing at a young age, inspired by the daughter of one of her mother’s coworkers. She approached the singer’s vocal coach and specifically asked to be taught how to sing the national anthem.
“When I started singing, I didn’t even know it,” she says. “I learned the lyrics; I learned some sort of tempo.”
The first time she performed the anthem for a sporting event was for a football game, taking a second to break from her role as a cheerleader. Being that she was around six years old at the time, the person in the press box seemed a tad skeptical.
“At one of the games, I went up to the box, and I said, ‘Hey, can I sing the national anthem?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know, can you?’” she says. “I was very nervous because I never sang it before; I was just going for it. And I was even nervous to go up there. I made one of my friends go up there with me and ask him.”
Following that initial performance, she returned to her vocal coach with a determined mindset to get better at singing the anthem, including honing in on its lyrics and pacing. Addison, a mezzo-soprano, says the song is one of the most challenging for singers.
“There’s a bunch of different highs, lows, mediums, that you have to work around to get your voice to where not also that it has to be, but where the song actually sounds like the song,” she said. “I’ve learned this from personal experience: if your voice is not at the dynamics it’s supposed to be, it doesn’t sound like the part of the national anthem.”
Addison says the most difficult part of the song is its stirring ending, with the final lyric, “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” This is when she needs to overpower the crowd’s roar at a sporting event while holding onto the note of the word “free,” which captives the crow even more.
Along with the total range of 19 semitones for which a singer needs to be capable of hitting, there is no actual tempo an a cappella performer needs to establish when performing the song. For Addison, this isn’t so much of a challenge as it is an exciting opportunity to do something different with nearly every performance.
“You kind of get to make your own [tempo]; that’s why it’s kind of different every time I sing because sometimes I just change when I’m singing. [I’ll say], ‘Ooh, maybe I’ll try this,’ in the middle of the song,” she says.
On top of the challenging nature of just singing the song, Addison is keen to adapt to the environment in which she is performing. She takes into consideration the sonic qualities of the sound system through which her voice is heard, the acoustics of an indoor or outdoor space, and the structural properties that would influence those acoustics.
“All of my systems are different. Some are more echo, [and] some are more stabilizing, but you just have to work your voice with what kind of system it is. If it’s outside, it’s more echo-y,” she says. “The basketball games at Quinnipiac, it’s big, but it’s also very controlled and stabilized because they have a good system.”
In the case of a hockey game, Addison must be aware that her voice will bounce off the surface of the ice with an old system that projects plenty of echo.
“Especially because it’s in a rink, the sound projects off of the ice, so it makes it louder, and it’s also kind of delayed. I’ve learned to work my voice around that because I’ve sang there a bunch of times.”
As a listener, Addison veers towards country music, listing her favorite singers as Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Bryan, and Luke Combs. Her preference for country was instilled in her before she was born, when her mother, Michelle, went to go see Carrie Underwood perform when she was pregnant with Addison. The American Idol champion and famed singer is one of her two biggest favorites, while she steps outside the country world to appreciate her other favorite singer, Adele. Addison says the dynamic English singer is an inspiration to her for her approach to singing overall, especially the national anthem, with regard to its many ranges.
“I like to sing songs that I can show my range, and I can show my voice. That’s why I don’t normally sing country songs in my shows,” Addison says.