Margarita M. Phillips 
Go to a Cotuit Kettleers game, especially on a Wednesday night, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear the national anthem sung by Cape Harmony. Founded in 2006, Cape Harmony are an all-female, college-aged a cappella group, and in 2014 the group began performing at Lowell Park in conjunction with their performances at the nearby Cotuit Federated Church.
Alyssa Sposato, a 20-year-old rising singer at the State University of New York in Potsdam, is in her sophomore year with Cape Harmony. She is both singer and director of public relations for the group.
How many Cape Cod Baseball League games per year does he play at Cape Harmony?
We try to do as much as possible. I think we’ve played maybe four or five now, but we would like to play more throughout the summer. It just depends on the summer and the teams that contact us.
And not just at Cotuit games, right?
We mostly played at Cotuit. We have a really good relationship with the Kettleers, but we’ve played in other types of games as well.
Do your singers already know the national anthem before the summer?
We have our own arrangement of the national anthem which has been passed down through the years of Cape Harmony. It’s just one of the things in our set, like any other song, that we have to learn. We repeat it, we put it together, and then once we know it, we sing it a bunch of times.
Does the national anthem take on extra meaning for your band, given how often you will be singing it?
The emphasis is on singing the national anthem, making sure we sing our best. Not that any of our songs have a higher or lower priority than the others, but certainly because we attract a large part of our audience to our shows through the different games we play. This may be the first time someone has heard us sing.
Cape Harmony, being all college-aged singers, does it pair well with the Cape League, which is all made up of college-aged baseball players and interns?
It makes the environment very welcoming, to see people doing similar things. We’ve made a lot of connections with people we see at different games, people who do internships and people who play. It’s a very friendly environment.
Is this one of the songs you will play most often during the summer?
There are quite a few songs that are a bit like standards that we sing a lot. The national anthem, things like “Happy Birthdayâ€, we sing them all the time.
How much does the band’s song selection change each year?
We change it every year in terms of the songs we do. There are songs that are audience favorites that we love to bring back – “Love Shack†(by the B-52s), for example, is a song we’ve brought back for a few years now – but we’re trying to change and make sure you know that we have current songs that a lot of kids will enjoy, things that are newer, and then things that are older that older people might enjoy.
How does a singer become a member of Cape Harmony?
We usually do our auditions in the winter, trying to plan for the summer. You send a video audition. There are different requirements: a song you can sing along to, warm-ups so we can get a feel for your range, an intro so we can get to know you. … As a rule of thumb, we invite people in Boston to come to an in-person callback, where we can interview them, ask them questions, get to know them better. We can sing along with them, see how they sound with the current version of Cape Harmony, and hear more solos from them.
What other a cappella bands have influenced Cape Harmony?
We are definitely inspired by groups that were in Cape Town before us. Hyannis Sound has been around much longer than us and so has Vineyard Sound. We’ve certainly been able to join this wave of groups that were here before us, and also the groups that we come from. A lot of us are in our college groups in school, and we all take different things that we’ve learned from those other groups and bring them to the group.
Contact Matt Goisman at [email protected]
