On Pentecost Sunday, the Church celebrates the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles to aid their evangelization. Miraculously, Acts 2 describes people of every nation visiting Jerusalem being able to understand them, and dating back to the early Church, Pentecost has become a vital celebration of the Church’s unity and the Holy Spirit’s presence. How fitting it was then that on our Sunday morning in Seoul, we sang in a Pentecost service! The Cardinal Singers were invited to sing in a service at Yonsei University’s Luce Chapel. Yonsei University is a private, Christian university that is regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in Korea, and its graduates include a Nobel laureate, a Fulkerson Prize-winning mathematician, and our assistant conductor Dr. Won Joo Ahn!
Dr. Hatteberg was asked to conduct at a church led by another UofL alumnus in Seoul, so Dr. Ahn conducted us on two pieces in her alma mater’s Luce Chapel as a post-sermon offertory. The congregation was extremely welcoming, and they even gave us bulletins printed in English with the sermon notes listed too. In a true sign of the international impact of American choral music, Yonsei’s chapel choir sang Moses Hogan’s spiritual arrangement “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” After the service was over, the whole choir had lunch at a restaurant close to Yonsei’s campus. I’ve mostly given up on typing restaurant names in the blog because most of their signs are only in Korean, but just know that the food was very good!
After lunch, we had free time in the afternoon, so Amelia and I continued our Pentecost experience by going to a Mass at Myeongdong Cathedral (the same cathedral we visited a few days ago). The church was packed, and while we were nearly the only foreigners there, we could keep up with most of what was being said during the Mass due to familiarity with the liturgy. During the offertory, the Cathedral passed out commemorative cards celebrating Pentecost and giving advice, and my card translated advised me to “Take God as my counselor in every moment of life” and “become aware of the presence of God.” After spending a Pentecost Sunday sharing in the same religious music and liturgy halfway around the world, it’s difficult not to feel aware of and in awe of the presence of God.
In the evening, we had one of the most meaningful experiences of the entire trip. We had dinner as a group at an American-style buffet called Ashley Queens, and the dinner was hosted by UofL choral conducting and alumni former Cardinal Singers living in Korea! Many of our graduate students over the years have been from Korea (including two in my own class and one graduating next year), and it gave me chills to see the impact of Dr. Hatteberg and our choral conducting program abroad. Several of the alumni are now professors at universities in Korea and music ministers at large churches, and it was fantastic to share dinner with them. Dr. Hatteberg gave a short speech introducing them and highlighting some of the spontaneous musical connections that led to decades-long relationships, and then to close out the evening, we sang A Little While by the Filipino composer Ily Matthew Maniano for them before singing My Old Kentucky Home together! Choral music reaches across borders in tangible ways, and seeing proof of that at dinner was the perfect way to end Pentecost Sunday.
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