Music and Religion in a Postmodern Culture: Conceptual Integration in Compositions by Glass,Golijov, and Reich

While the use of sacred themes as entertainment in Western art music is not new, the highly diverse religious beliefs in contemporary culture has changed the way successful composers use sacred themes in their compositions. Recent spiritually themed compositions, specifically those that exhibit religious pluralism and eclecticism, can be viewed within the larger cultural trend labeled postmodernism. This dissertation analyzes significant passages from three musical compositions that blend traits of both musical and religious postmodernism: Steve Reich's The Cave (1993), Philip Glass's Symphony No. 5 (2000), and Osvaldo Golijov's La Pasion Segun San Marcos (2000). The analyses demonstrate how musical and religious postmodern concepts of closure, time, and restaging tradition interact in the three compositions. The dissertation utilizes "Conceptual Integration Networks" (CINs) modeled on those in Lawrence Zbikowski's Conceptualizing Music (2002) as a visual framework of cross-domain mapping to highlight the integration of musical and religious postmodernism within each piece.