The culmination of Nicholas Harkness's research on and around South Korean Christian voicing, Songs of Seoul, tackles two subjects that are tough to address: South Korean Christianity and voice. Generally speaking, the South Korean church's record of loud and often-controversial involvement in the twentieth-century politics of South Korea (hereafter, Korea) makes it an easy target of simplistic analysis. And as for voice, the challenge stems from its semantic and semiotic instability: how do we define voice, where do we anchor it for the purpose of analysis, and what does it mean (12)? Songs of Seoul deals with both subjects remarkably well, offering a nuanced perspective on Korean Christianity and its ritual function within the larger society through a compelling theorization of voice as an object of sociocultural analysis. An example of productive interdisciplinary work, the book develops an ethnographic study of voice and voicing in Korean Christianity as the basis for a theory that tackles issues of voice in anthropology while using this theory to fashion a new angle through which to think about national narrative and modern subjectivity in Korea.

Songs of Seoul makes a series of related arguments, and among the most important is that Korean Christians, particularly those who attend churches with affluent congregations, aim to exhibit certain idealized qualities of contemporary Christian personhood by cultivating a ‘clean’ voice, a voice used in European-style classical singing (6). For the practitioners, this voice stands for Christian progress and expresses a joyful, peaceful present, signalled in part through the absence of vocalization of suffering and discomfort, attributed to an earlier time in national history (7). This argument is grounded in a broad and rigorous theorization of voice in the introductory chapter. The detailed theory does not indicate exclusive applicability to the Korean case and thus implies cross-cultural generalizability.

Harkness begins the theoretical discussion with the question of how we might conceive of voice in sociocultural analysis: ‘What is the voice as an object of anthropological study? Or rather, what ought it to be for the purpose of sociocultural analysis?’ (12). Addressing this question, he stresses the difficulty of isolating voice from semiotics, thus taking a deconstructive approach towards the notion of voice as ‘voice proper’, that is, prior to semiotics. He then argues for a model that emphasizes not the priority of sound production but ‘the sonic uptake and categorization of sound in the world’ (12) and proposes the concept of phonosonic nexus to facilitate an understanding of voice as a processual, practical intersection of the phonic (dimensions of vocal production) and the sonic (dimensions of semiotics). He states, ‘I treat the voice as an ongoing intersection between the phonic production, shaping, and organization of sound, on the one hand, and the sonic uptake and categorization of sound in the world, on the other’ (12). This perspective thus questions the perceived separation between speech and song, between ‘literal voice’ and ‘tropic voice’, and between bodily process and cultural conceptualization, and puts forward the critical notion that the voice is fundamentally social and cultural (12–17). As Harkness puts it, ‘voice in the concrete sense and voicing in the tropic sense are scalar relations of the same thing from the point of view of semiotic function’ (12).

A fascinating aspect of the theoretical discussion in Songs of Seoul is the author's insistence that voice, as he conceives of it, is not merely an instrument of ideology but an instrument that realizes the values of powerful institutions for the individuals who are voicing and, by extension, for those who are listening to them empathetically. He clarifies that the focal point of his theory is not the discursive framing of voice, but rather the practical, ongoing, and institutionally backed meaning-making of the individuals through vocal production: ‘[Voice] is a primary medium through which a person situates herself in worlds of significance, which makes the configuration of social lives, in all of their acoustic and corporeal dimensions, congruent and in dialogue with presupposable social configurations of some sort, at different scales’ (18). The reference to the term ‘qualia’ rather than ‘quality’ reinforces and develops this point. Qualia, Harkness explains, alludes to ‘the actual instantiation of sensuous quality’ and to the positioning of one's voice through phonic tuning and manipulation within a ‘sonically experienced framework of value’ (15). This concept, to be sure, is somewhat difficult to grasp through definition alone, and it is through ethnographic illustrations in later chapters (particularly, chapters 2 and 5) that one begins to apprehend it. The emphasis on embodiment and materiality entailed in this theory is not always welcome in studies of culture that privilege discourse and ideology, but it is also this emphasis that allows one to deal with the problematic of agency, and which highlights meaning-making as a process, an aspect that is often unaccounted for in studies with a hermeneutic bent.

Now moving to the actual ethnography, Songs of Seoul studies songak, a style of Western classical singing that is intimately linked with the values and aspirations of South Korean Christian institutions, despite its outwardly secular appearance. Many of the songak singers we read about participate in the musical life of Somang Church, whose members have a ‘reputation for being successful, wealthy, powerful, and conservative’ (52). The ethnographic accounts focus on the author's interaction with songak practitioners in the context of voice lessons, university classes, choir rehearsals (Harkness joined one of the choirs of Somang Church), and voice recitals, and they illustrate how these singers professionalize, perform, and relate to one another as they navigate church and school. As the book advances, we get a holistic understanding of certain common trajectories and challenges of the singers; for example, they play leading roles in the choral life of Somang Church, study or teach voice in prestigious universities in Seoul, and face a set of expectations that include study abroad, ‘homecoming concert’, and discipleship under voice teachers. These trajectories and challenges, according to the author, constitute the framework of value that shapes their voicing. Or, put differently, voice – the cultivation, the tuning, and the feeling of voice – is the very medium through which institutionally backed personhood and sociality are materialized.

Songs of Seoul benefits from the author's ability to sense structural inconsistencies and the informants’ anxieties, and his choice to treat these as opportunities for learning about songak in its lived reality. I imagine that otherwise it would be very challenging to make sense of a vocal culture that, despite its contemporary pervasiveness and historical influence in Korea, may appear to be something of an aberration to some North American scholars due to its apparent basis in Western classical singing. In the text of Songs of Seoul, readers encounter not an assortment of neatly processed final reports, but an ethnographer who continues to stumble on certain aspects of songak that contradict the preconceptions that he had brought to the field about this vocal practice and the larger Korean society in which it means something. We often find anecdotes that narrate the author's ‘discovery’ of dimensions that may be surprising to the unfamiliar observer but that are central to the everyday operation of songak (and the insights resulting from such revelatory moments in turn seem to have informed the design of various extended interviews and directed surveys). Consider, for example, how the author came to know the ‘homecoming recital’ as an evangelical ritual despite its firm footing in secular conservatories in and out of Korea (4–7) and how he came to identify intertextual linkage between school and church as he observed a voice teacher in a university class spontaneously drawing on the emotional and social experience of church to release the students’ doubts about their vocal performance (168–9).

Harkness's research also benefits from his competency in classical vocal music, which he obtained prior to his fieldwork in Seoul (3). A number of passages in the book demonstrate the author's knowledge of the physical and technical dimensions of phonation in European-style classical singing – that is, matters of the jaw, tongue, glottis, larynx, and so on. This knowledge allows him to come up with a range of vocal-quality designations that highlight particular material dimensions of voice. For instance, Harkness uses the terms ‘ventricular voice’ and ‘faucalized voice’ in analysing a Korean pastor's sermon, during which he tunes his voice quality to illustrate the different perspectives of Jesus and the Pharisees, in this process expressing and embodying Christian and ‘un-Christian’ perspectives on Korea's present. The analysis of the sermonic speech through these terms highlights the linking of specific physical manipulations, ‘the perceived sensuous qualities of sound’ that result from such manipulations, and disparate moral positions (70–3). Another fascinating voice-quality designation is ‘fricative voice gestures’ (FVG), by which the author means ‘voiceless, high-pitched emissions of sound that are produced by air friction along the vocal tract’ (123). He identifies this sound as the category through which certain voice students define and characterize ‘incorrect’ and ‘older’ songak techniques. The reproduction of spectrograms and the inclusion of images comparing typical vocal cords of singers in disparate singing traditions in the book are continuous with the empirical, quantitative facet of the work that supports qualitative statements about the material aspect of semiotics (74, 98). While readers used to humanistic methods might be inclined to question such empirically oriented approaches, it is this setup that makes verifiable and measurable the connection between embodiment and semiotics and between the personal and the social. Ultimately, the author's awareness of the materiality of voice helps to generate credible evidence for his broader claim that it is difficult to disengage phonic dimensions of voice from ‘tropic’ dimensions that encompass aesthetics, ethics, institutional ideology, social value, and moral perspective (12).

Now I turn to chapter summaries. Chapter 1, ‘Transformation of Voice’, demonstrates how people align with the different qualities of voice and relate to one another in terms of these qualities. Harkness's interactions with Koreans from different socioeconomic backgrounds – a taxi driver, an internationally renowned soprano, and songak students – show that vocal sounds are differentiated through the linkage of practical engagement and discursive structures of meaning. The chapter focuses on two voices. One of them is associated with Korea's past history of suffering, which is understood to result in a ‘kind of embodied technique of sadness and frustration expressed in the sound of the “traditional voice”’ (47). In contrast, the voice idealized in South Korean Christianity, which embodies ‘progress’ for many Christians, is evaluated in terms of its differentiations from the voices of the past. By showing how the informants engage with, do not engage with, or do not know how to engage with either of these voices, chapter 1 argues that voice that does not sound like suffering, cultivated within a Christian aesthetics of progress and aspiration, entails ‘a transformation of sociality around a transformation of meaning’ (47).

Chapter 2, ‘Voicing an Advanced Korea’, demonstrates that phonic production is anchored in the tropic extension of voice (i.e., voice as an immanent narrative that is oriented towards a moral perspective). The most important ethnographic material in this chapter involves a sermonic speech of Pastor Kim Chi-ch’ōl, the head pastor of Somang Church, which the author analyses through the categories of ‘ventricular voice’ and ‘faucalized voice’. The analysis shows that the pastor, by manipulating the phonosonic voice, expresses and differentiates between two perspectives rooted in a Christian understanding of Korea's ethnonational history: one highlighting Christianity's role in delivering Korea from a ‘pagan’ past to national progress and the other embodying pre-Christian past. It concludes that synchronic vocal variations such as the one found in the pastor's speech ‘models a diachronic story of vocal change over ethnonational time’ (78).

In chapter 3, ‘Cultivating the Christian Voice’, Harkness explores ‘the emergence of sŏngak as a semiotic register of communication and its connection to Evangelicalism within the Korean Christian church’ (81). The chapter first provides a historical overview of singing as a privileged form of social actions for Korean Christians. It then extends the discussion of the systematic intertwining of voice qualities and social categories within the Christian narrative of progress by detailing the valorization of particular vocal sounds by songak singers. The final section demonstrates that the phonic elements of vocalization are recognized and managed in the form of ‘bodily habituation’, relying on an analysis of different mouth shapes in images and practice and a brief overview of local theories of corporeal naturalness (82). It concludes that churches are ‘sites from which authorized examples of the beauty of the voice, the enlightenment of the heart, and the advancement of a people emanate’ (109).

Chapter 4, ‘The Clean Voice’, investigates what the songak informants call the ‘clean voice’ and argues that the production and experience of this idealized voice quality relate to its temporal positioning within the Christian narrative of progress. The author first details a study during which professional songak singers described vocal sounds in various genres of singing, including opera, popular music, pansori, and Argentine gaucho singing. In this study, those voices that used ‘forceful laryngeal adduction, glottal friction, subglottic pressure, and tension’ were often described as ‘unclean’ or ‘unhealthy’ (117). The author also presents an extended anecdote that explores the singers’ characterization of different songak styles in performance in terms of FVG (see above). He shows that FVG is often a category of characterization that certain singers with Western training use to critique particular voice techniques of singers in Korea and posits that the ‘clean voice’ and FVG are understood to be in a qualitative continuum of ethnonational development. The chapter ends with a fascinating discussion of the temporalized discourse of cleanliness as distilled in the national campaign for sanitary bathrooms and the mythologized idea of excremental water and other images of suffering associated with pansori singers.

In chapter 5, ‘Tuning the Voice’, Harkness argues that vocalization contributes to particular institutional structures by examining how songak singers move between the interlocked organizations of church and school through qualic tuning. The chapter first sketches out the different forms of discipleship and sociality in churches and schools: the former is driven by a promise of a horizontal community oriented towards a single god while the latter is driven by a hierarchical model that entails students’ loyalty to the teachers’ vocal techniques, service, and, sometimes, a surprising amount of payment. Through a range of ethnographic anecdotes that reveal a lot about Korea's music education system, Harkness demonstrates that vocalization expresses the singers’ discipleship under the two different systems and that intertextual vocal tuning can sometimes help them release psycho-physical strain that comes in part from institutional contradictions.

Chapter 6, ‘The Voice of Homecoming’, investigates the ‘homecoming recital’, performed almost without exception by songak singers after they return to Korea from studying voice in Europe or North America. The chapter connects textual analysis with sociocultural analysis to illustrate that the homecoming recital depends on and contributes to the interpenetration of the religious and the secular. Building on this insight, Harkness argues that the recital serves as a transformative ritual for the sociality of the audience and the personhood of the singer (178). At the heart of this argument is the encore of a Christian hymn typically sung by the performer at the end of a scripted repertory of Western classical music. The author demonstrates that this encore maps and authorizes the idealized transition of a songak singer: it links ‘a history of classical music composition starting in Europe and ending in Korea with a biography of a classical singer that is returning from Europe to Korea in a single culminating point’ (196).

Chapter 7, ‘Feeling the Voice’, explores maum, the medium through which many contemporary Korean Christians profess experiencing emotions or feelings. While this chapter continues to develop the theme of sociality developed in chapters 5 and 6, it is distinctive in its focus on a reported medium of experience specific to Korea. Harkness first locates maum in ‘a specifically Christian discursive register’ by investigating its emergence in Bible translation (203). He then analyses narratives by two songak singers who position maum as a source of transformative singing. In these accounts, maum operates as a religiously charged conceptualization that Christianizes secular voicing and that links ‘personally felt emotional experiences’ with ‘culturally recognizable emotionality’ (203).

While Songs of Seoul is committed to addressing problematics in anthropology, particularly semiotic anthropology, its broad theorization and insight on the immanent connection between speech and song make it highly relevant to the ethnomusicological study of vocal music. In particular, it makes a timely contribution to ethnographic scholarship on vocal music in contemporary Asia, reinforcing this field's recent interest in exploring the affective dimensions of modern subjectivity through the study of expressive vocal culture.Footnote ¹ It also joins a number of Korea-specific publications in ethnomusicology and extends their tight contextualization of expressive voices within Korea's sociocultural aspirations and anxieties.Footnote ² In sum, Songs of Seoul is a remarkable account on many levels: the solid framework presented in the introductory chapter is supported beautifully with a wide range of concrete examples in the subsequent chapters; a highly original perspective is fleshed out in analytical terms via concepts in semiotics; and the subtlety of analysis compellingly troubles the boundary between speech and song, materiality and ideology, and text and context.

I cannot help but end the review on a personal note, as I have been waiting since 2000, then an ethnic Korean student studying in a North American university, to find in the university's music library a book that would narrate the city of Seoul as I experienced it while living there in the 1980s and the early 1990s and visiting it regularly thereafter. That city, to me, is one in which different conceptions of ethnonational time were affectively realized through the contest of high-rise buildings, labyrinthine alleyways, and centuries-old palaces, and, even more compellingly, through the diverse but characteristic voices that were mapped onto Seoul's urban geography and distinct social groups. In Songs of Seoul I find an honest portrayal of this city.