Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea by Nicholas Harkness (review)

In Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea, Nicholas Harkness conducts a compelling ethnographic study of the sŏngak (European classical vocal style) singing voice in contemporary Seoul. Harkness examines sŏngak in the context of Korean Christian Presbyterian churches, which he argues are the ritual centers for the acculturation and propagation of the sŏngak voice in Korea. Harkness asserts that the sŏngak style, which prizes the quality of vocal “cleanliness,” acquired power and prestige through alignment with Christian aesthetics and a narrative of spiritual and ethnonational progress.

Organized into two parts, “The Qualities of Voice” and “The Sociality of Voice,” the book takes a multifaceted approach to the voice, exploring voice in both a concrete physical sense, and voicing in the tropic sense, as a channel of social communication. One of the book’s strengths lies in this approach to the “human voice as phonosonic nexus,” which Harkness defines as “an ongoing interaction between the phonic production, shaping, and organization of sound, on the one hand, and the sonic uptake and categorization of the sound in the world, on the other” (p. 12). Harkness draws on fieldwork in Korean Presbyterian churches (principally Somang Presbyterian Church), schools of music (including Seoul National University’s Department of Voice), and concert halls to show how the “cleaning of the voice,” which entails the cultivation of the sŏngak voice and the erasure of vocal qualities associated with traditional Korean music such as p’ansori, enacts a chronotope of Christian development and social advancement.

Harkness’s interdisciplinary work, the first to integrate cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and ethnomusicology in a study of Korean Christian singing, builds on models such as Steven Feld’s Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1982), an ethnographic study of sound as a cultural system among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea; Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (1997), an ethnography of the semiotics of place and landscapes for the Western Apache of Cibecue, Arizona; and Chan E. Park’s Voices from the Straw Mat: Toward an Ethnography of Korean Story Singing (2003), an ethno-graphic study of p’ansori singing and storytelling.¹ Like Chan E. Park, whose performative knowledge of the p’ansori tradition informs her ethnographic analysis, Harkness is able to describe features and qualities of the sŏngak voice that are strived for by Korean Christian singers with precise detail and somatic authority due to his vocal training in European classical music, which he acquired in Germany prior to undertaking this study. For example, he describes vocal “cleanliness” as referring “to the suppression and removal of two types of unwanted sounds: the ‘fuzz’ caused by pressed vocal cords, abrasions on the vocal cords, or other forms of what we might call ‘obstruence’ along the vocal tract; and the ‘wobble’ of unstable vocal adduction, ‘shakiness’ from habituated muscle tension, or an ‘artificial’ vibrato” (p. 9; see also Harkness’s discussion of a particular “unclean” sound, what he terms the “fricative voice gesture, or FVG,” pp. 123–27). Bel canto (Italian for “beautiful singing”), valued in the European classical tradition, is contrasted in depth with the “rough” and “husky” qualities of p’ansori singing, which are perceived by singers of sŏngak to be not only unhealthy for the voice but also “unclean.”

Whereas Keith Basso explored features of the land in Cibecue as mnemonic markers of Western Apache culture through stories embedded in the landscape, here Harkness reveals the soundscape that is the idealized Korean Christian sŏngak voice, a voice which is ritually inscribed with a narrative of Christian progress and ethnonational advancement in Korean Presbyterian churches. In his perceptive analysis, Harkness identifies an underlying tension in the acquisition of sŏngak by...