This thesis critically examines the roles and representations of Eastern spirituality in avant-garde classical music from the early twentieth century to the present. By examining the history of Asian religious traditions in the United States and their influence upon musical works that fuse Eastern and Western cultures, I argue that intercultural contemporary music often perpetuates pervasive attitudes and assumptions regarding the relationship between spirituality, Asia, and artistry that are historically amnesiac, culturally reductionistic, and perversely antithetical to the progressive egalitarian values typically associated with musical interculturalism.

In Chapter 1, I outline how Asian religious traditions were adapted to suit a Western audience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to the imperialist pressures exerted by European and American military forces, and how those adaptations related to art and aesthetics. Chapter 2 examines how the idea of “spirituality” coalesced in the popular imagination in the context of the political and social rebellion of the counterculture era, further establishing an imagined link between an ambiguous Eastern spirituality and creative ability, before becoming heavily commodified in the 1980s. Chapter 3 surveys how musical representations of Eastern spirituality today continue to systemically support and produce the attitudes and assumptions outlined in the first two chapters without confronting their historically dubious claims.