SACRED SUBJECTS TO MUSIC: PHILIP GLASS

The contemporary composer Philip Glass is not a religious composer, but his interest in sacred subjects has resulted in some of his most stirring scores. 

For example, in his 1979 opera Satyagraha, he set to music the Bhagavad Gita.  The title Satyagraha refers to Mohandas K. Gandhi's concept of non-violent resistance to injustice. The text of the opera is sung in the original Sanskrit.  In performance, translation is usually provided in supertitles.

In his soundtrack for the 1997 epic film Kundun, Glass set to music the life of the Dalai Lama.  The word kundun means "presence" and is a title by which the Dalai Lama is addressed.  The film by Martin Scorsese was released a few months after Jean-Jacques Annaud's film Seven Years in Tibet and shares the latter's location along with the depiction of the Dalai Lama at various stages of his youth.  The Scorsese film, however, covers a period three times longer.

In his 2006 choral symphony The Passion of Ramakrishna, Glass tells the story of the Bengali mystic who, despite suffering from throat cancer which made speech for him excruciating, continues to preach about the unimportance of physical suffering.  The part of Ramakrishna is sung not by a soloist but by the entire chorus, echoing the words of Ramakrishna's wife, Sarada Devi, "No one is a stranger.  Make the whole world your own."