In the past several decades, the field of Korean studies has been enriched by a number of cutting-edge ethnographic works dealing with various sociocultural dimensions of contemporary South Korea, particularly relating to the issues of South Korean modernity and modernization. In this vibrant field, anthropologist Nicholas Harkness's book Songs of Seoul stands out by providing an eye-opening window into contemporary South Korean social life and its journey to modernity from an innovative, semiotically informed perspective. Songs of Seoul is an ethnographic analysis of South Korean Christian music, specifically through an investigation of vocal music and voice.

In this work, Harkness takes voice as an object of anthropological study and as a vehicle for sociocultural analysis of South Korea. Treating voice fully as a culturally shaped and embedded “social act,” Harkness uses the study of voice and voicing in Christian vocal music to shed light on how modernity is expressed and modern personhood articulated in Korean Christianity. Harkness draws upon fieldwork that includes studies of churches, schools of music, and concerts, as well as personal participation as a choral singer in one of the largest megachurches of Seoul, the Somang Presbyterian Church.

But why does Harkness choose Christian vocal music as an object of study to explore the experience of modernity in South Korea? This is where Harkness makes his most novel and possibly controversial contribution. The reason that he chooses to study sŏngak, or Western classical vocal music, to explore this issue is due to his unexpected discovery that the vast majority of sŏngak performers and professionals in South Korea are Christian—more specifically, evangelical Protestant—and that sŏngak is essentially a Christian practice, or as he describes it, a “Christian register of communication in Korea” (p. 5). In the book, Harkness provides an illuminating account of how sŏngak is a form of vocal practice and profession that not only encapsulates the ideals of Christian modernity, but also is entwined institutionally in an intimate way with Christian churches and, surprisingly, cannot sustain its existence outside of these churches.

Harkness's central argument is that sŏngak represents—using European-style classical singing as a model—the ways in which certain idealized qualities of Christian personhood, and of the modern individual in general, is expressed through vocalization. He states, “Through performance and professionalization, prayer and evangelism, manipulations of sound and body, singers of sŏngak in Korea try to exhibit the qualities of Korean Christian modernity in the qualia of their voices. Their voices become emblems of this state of striving, revealing both their successes and failures as they work toward this goal” (p. 226). But while European-style classical music is clearly a “privileged nexus of phonic and sonic practice for Christians” (p. 3) in South Korea, and while sŏngak moreover represents a collective Korean Christian effort to purge itself of the unenlightened, superstitious, and suffering-filled past—for instance through sŏngak singers' cultivation of what Harkness refers to as the “clean” voice—he also demonstrates the ways in which singers of sŏngak are engaged in Koreanizing sŏngak voices and making Korea the spiritual world center and an advanced Christian nation.

The book is divided into two parts with four chapters in each, the first part entitled “The Qualities of Voice” and the second part, “The Sociality of Voice.” Part 1 mainly deals with the features and practices of the voice and their “moral backing” in Christian South Korea, examining in particular how the qualities of sŏngak voice and voicing are related to the Christian ideology of progress, one that combines a story of ethnonational advancement with one of spiritual progress, but at the same time involves a suppression and erasure of the undeveloped and unenlightened Korean past. Part 2 focuses on the institutional aspects of sŏngak as it relates to the churches—particularly how the lives and careers of the sŏngak singers are anchored in the church—and how the church intersects in a tension-ridden way with educational institutions of music.

This rich, theoretically informed ethnography provides an insightful look at the meaning of the Christian singing voice and voicing, and how these are related to the larger South Korean project of modernity and striving for progress and ethnonational advancement. The book, however, leaves one with a couple of questions. First, although Harkness makes clear that this is a study of how such ethnonational aspirations are embodied and voiced by a particular segment of Korean Christianity, namely, the Christian sŏngak singers, one wonders to what extent his arguments about sŏngak and what it represents about Christian personhood and modernity might be generalizable to Christianity as a whole.

To be sure, Harkness does qualify at the end that this “model” he constructs, one that equates sŏngak voice to Christian modernity, does not apply to everyone, certainly not everyone involved in sŏngak and especially not those who may not be Christians. But the analysis of sŏngak voice and voicing among Korean Christian singers and its association with the particular ideals of Christian modernity does seem to speak to the ethos of South Korean Christianity as a whole. Thus, one wonders to what degree Harkness's strong arguments about the significance of sŏngak in the Christian churches, especially of it being emblematic simultaneously of the modern Korean personhood and of the erasure of the Korean past and tradition, are applicable to the beliefs and orientation of the Korean churches. Although Korean Christianity as a whole has historically been associated with modernity, Korean Christian culture, as it has come to be indigenized and “Koreanized,” is a complex mix and crucible of the past, present, and future in which such clear-cut equation with modernity and modern selfhood might be difficult to make. The second issue the book leaves one wondering about is the ethnography's relative absence of discussion regarding Harkness's fieldwork experiences and his positionality vis-à-vis the informants.

These questions aside, Songs of Seoul is a must-read for anyone interested in deepening one's knowledge of contemporary South Korean social life, Korean Christianity, and semiotically informed theorization of voice.