Harvard students take on the national anthem challenge

"The Star-Spangled Banner" sits in a strange place in American life. Everyone knows it. Everyone has an opinion about how it should sound. And it's genuinely hard to sing — that octave-and-a-half range, the unexpected leaps between notes, the way it seems designed to trip up even confident vocalists.

This year, Harvard decided to lean into that tension rather than shy away from it. The Office for the Arts and Athletics launched a collaboration to bring student musicians into game-day traditions, and the results say something interesting about what happens when you take a familiar ritual seriously.

"The national anthem is something that you've heard at the Super Bowl. You've heard the Whitney Houston version, you've heard the Lady Gaga version," said sophomore Bekuochukwu Uzo-Menkiti, one of nineteen student performers selected from October auditions. "It's hard for people to hear someone sing the national anthem and not expect some kind of personal flair."

But here's where it gets deeper. For these students, the anthem isn't just a technical challenge or a performance slot. It's personal.

Senior Damla Yesil, who performed at a men's ice hockey game, found herself thinking about her parents' journey from Bulgaria and Turkey as she prepared. "Once I got up there, all the nerves went away because I was like, 'Oh, this is not about me,'" she said. "I have to make people feel like America is their home. It's a special moment for people."

For junior Zeb Jewell-Alibhai, who moved to the U.S. from Portugal at age 8 and became a citizen in January, playing the anthem on saxophone at the women's basketball opener carried a different weight entirely. "This is the first time I've played it since becoming an American," he said.

One of the most striking contributions came from sophomore Grace Hur, who sang at two women's ice hockey games while simultaneously performing American Sign Language interpretation of the lyrics. It's a choice that reframes what "singing" the anthem even means. "I wanted to make the anthem a bit more inclusive," Hur explained. "There are many different ways of signing the same lyrics, because American Sign Language is a meaning-based language rather than a word-to-word translation. Everyone translates and interprets it differently, and so I've learned how diverse this one song can be for different people."

Fiona Coffey, director of the Office for the Arts, sees this collaboration as part of a larger truth about Harvard students. "They are remarkably multifaceted: artists, athletes, and scholars, who fluidly move among disciplines with talent and passion," she said. "Many of our students embody this artist-athlete intersection, modeling how each pursuit deepens the other."

As for the technical challenge, Uzo-Menkiti has straightforward advice: repetition. "The voice is a muscle, so if you keep training it in one particular exercise, like the national anthem, then inevitably you'll get better at it. Your pitch will be better, your riffs will be cleaner, and you will be able to reach the notes with ease because you've done it so many times."

What started as a way to bring more student talent into Harvard's game-day experience has become something quieter and more meaningful — a reminder that rituals matter most when the people performing them understand why.