My dissertation examines Protestant choral music in Korea from its introduction by American missionaries in the early 20th century through its transnational diffusion and development during the Cold War and after. Drawing on recent bodies of scholarship in postcolonial studies, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Studies, as well as a mixed approach involving ethnographic, critical, and historical methods, I argue that Korean Protestant choral music played an important role in mediating the experience of modernity in modern Korea and the Korean diaspora in the U.S. I explore the development of this music practice as a hegemonic cultural formation and contextualize its privileged position in the entanglement of secular and Christian musical conceptions of modernity and nationhood--an entanglement facilitated by Korean Protestantism's close association with trans-Pacific modernity, with the U.S. at the center of this imagination. In addition to exploring the formation of normative choral and vocal music styles in historical context, I analyze the resistance of many practitioners to the demands and claims of cross-cultural musical syncretism and consider the controversial composition of neotraditional styles, which encode embodied, contested conceptions of Korean identity within a Western-style choral musical framework. This dissertation is a dynamic study of the ways in which colonial discourse concerning voice, nation, class, and gender shapes the affective and stylistic conditions of colonial and postcolonial music practices.

This dissertation examines musical settings of moral poetry in France from 1556-1652. Rooted in the history of philosophy and modern ethical theory, this research illuminates the emergence of musical settings of moral poetry as a response to the trauma of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. I argue that these settings offered Catholics and Protestants a means of collective repair, through the moral content of the text and through edifying experiences of repetition and beauty built into the musical settings. With their focus on virtue, these collections occupied an unusually neutral space in the otherwise polemical landscape of Francophone musical print culture. Furthermore, they emerged as part of a nascent “moral” genre, a domain of musical print culture that resists categorization as either sacred or secular. Because musical settings of moral poetry were used alongside confessionally-marked sacred texts in Catholic and Protestant education and domestic contexts, they were linked together under the broader banner of edifying music, sometimes labeled “chaste” or “honneste.” However, as the content of these moral texts were rooted in ancient philosophy, rather than in the authority of church tradition, they participated in the late sixteenth-century process of secularizing ethics. Through an analysis of their production and use, I consider how the widespread practice of singing moral poetry played a role in popularizing rational, ethical reflection over religious belief as the foundation for repairing damaged communal relations.