Liva Camarata Thrills Blue Devil Stadium Crowd

Junior Liva Camarata came through in a pinch and thrilled the Blue Devil Stadium crowd last Saturday night when she performed an incredible version of “The Star Spangled Banner” prior to Huntington’s home football game against visiting Smithtown East.

Ms. Camarata was pinch hitting for classmate Samuel Soric who was scheduled to perform the song last Friday night, but when a monster storm postponed the 6 p.m. game, Mr. Soric was unavailable the next day because he had to perform with the Blue Devil marching band at a Saturday evening competition.

The national anthem is a notoriously difficult song to sing and has tripped up well-known and highly regarded performers. The range of the song stretches one complete octave and a half. If you sing it in a key that lets you hit the high notes, it is almost impossible to sing the low notes. The reverse is equally true.

The website, voicecoach.com lays out the difficulties associated with the song when it notes “the entire first verse of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ is made up of only two sentences. The first sentence is really, really long and the whole song is full of phrasing and breathing landmines. Dangerous phrasing issues occur when the natural word-related phrase breaks come into conflict with the natural rhythmic and harmonic phrase breaks. Usually songwriters put important words on accented beats and on the higher notes. Our national anthem flies in the face of this tradition; some of the accents and words don’t match up to each other, making it appear to be acceptable even desirable to breathe in the middle of words.”

None of this seemed to faze Ms. Camarata in the least bit. She took the microphone and stood on the Blue Devil Stadium track and electrified fans, players and coaches. At least three times the Bluetooth connected microphone cut out for a split-second, but the teenager just went with it.

“Personally, I do a lot of performances on short notice, so I’m kind of used to it, but I think it takes a lot of vocal preparation and, most importantly, confidence,” said Ms. Camarata about last Saturday night. “After so many years of performing, I typically don’t get nervous, but I will admit that I do have some nervous moments occasionally. I would say that there are some difficult parts of the national anthem and it takes a lot of technique to sing it well.”