Propoetides

Propoetides by Dean Burry A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts Faculty of Music University of Toronto Abstract Propoetides is the prologue to the opera Il Giudizio di Pigmalione (The Judgment of Pygmalion) and was inspired by the following description from Ovid’s Metamorphosis: Nevertheless, the immoral Propoetides dared to deny that Venus was the goddess. For this, because of her divine anger, they are said to have been the first to prostitute their bodies and their reputations in public, and, losing all sense of shame, they lost the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks, and only a small change turned them into hard flints. The fifteen-minute work is scored for seven vocal soloists, women’s chorus, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, piano and strings. This setting of the myth (the libretto by the composer, with Italian translation by Sara Maida-Nicol) places Pygmalion as an Italian high-fashion magazine photo editor disgusted by Women’s Rights marchers who protest around him: a modern interpretation of the classical Propoetides. Photo editing techniques, including filtering, warping, cropping, layering, transparency, colour adjustment and cutting and pasting, are all incorporated into the score which explores, through tonality and dissonance, a violent dichotomy between equal human rights and traditional roles and models of women in society. Ovid’s story, and the opera’s libretto, builds on the idea of perfectionism. The ancient Greek notion of the golden ratio or divine proportion (1.618) has been exploited to rigidly define beauty for centuries and also is woven into the score of the opera, subtly influencing duration, harmony and texture. Propoetides theatrically and musically portrays the conflict for and against feminism, struggling against the kind of attitudes fostered both by Ovid’s myth two thousand years ago and the digitally altered, and influential, images so ubiquitous in modern media.D.M.A