Marblehead, MA - It was a seminal moment in high school choral director Amanda Roeder’s career, and she remembers it well. For the first time, Marblehead High School’s two a cappella groups were going head to head in the regional competition of the National Championship of High School A Cappella. The longer standing group The Jewel Tones had competed in the contest before and was favored to win, while the more nascent group Luminescence was, at the time, viewed by some as the “junior varsity.”
That was soon to change.
Roeder remembers sitting near the top of Marblehead’s cavernous theater during the show, thinking to herself that drama was about to unfold.
“Much to everybody’s surprise, Luminescence just rose up and put on a really phenomenal set and beat The Jewel Tones, and nobody saw that coming,” Roeder recalled, the shock and awe of the event still lingering.
After the scores were announced, Roeder snuck out the back of the theater to meet her students in the hallway; all of them were in tears.
“I’ve got 26 kids, all crying hysterically,” she remembered. “One group is crying because they’ve lost their chance at going to nationals, and the other group is crying because they had no idea that this was even a possibility for them. They were just beside themselves.”
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