Black Swan’s composition lesson Part 2

To recap Part 1 of my reac­tions to the film Black Swan, I posed the ques­tion of:

…how to rec­tify our train­ing with our wild-card pen­chant for cre­ativ­ity? Artists any­where will instantly rec­og­nize the theme of craft rest­ing on the precipice of aban­don, of the intel­lect ver­sus emotion.

A cen­tral prob­lem here is that our edu­ca­tion tends to be built upon teach­ing the craft and the skill. This sug­gests that artistry itself is not teach­able — oth­er­wise, why wouldn’t we just be taught the “art” side of things? Instead, musi­cians are taught their scales, dic­ta­tion the­ory, etc.

That next leap to artistry is a chal­lenge to teach, and this is an inter­est­ing ele­ment of Black Swan. Natalie Portman’s char­ac­ter is repeat­edly admon­ished to let her­self go, to dance with aban­don, to seduce, and to not be so (for lack of a bet­ter word) per­fect. In short, she needs to inject her intel­lec­tual side with some passion.

But what’s so wrong with per­fect? I found myself think­ing of a Beethoven sym­phony — take the slow move­ment of his Sev­enth. There is not a wrong note to be found, it is archi­tec­turally sound, it is superbly crafted from the sim­plest of rhyth­mic motifs. Much the same can be said for almost all of Beethoven’s music. Where exactly is the Dionysian aban­don? If it is there, it’s not some­thing we can exactly pin­point and then teach to another gen­er­a­tion of composers.

So then, what does a teacher say? What does a prac­ti­tioner of art do? Essen­tially, how is this done? Natalie Port­man spends half of the movie flail­ing in an attempt to find an answer and cross that line. We, the audi­ence, watch her crack under this pres­sure. The near­est advice she is given is to go home and touch her­self, a sala­cious sug­ges­tion, but one that has a larger metaphor­i­cal mean­ing, too. Get­ting in touch with your­self is a cru­cial aspect of artistry, and if you think about it, all the very best artists are rep­re­sen­ta­tions of a self-aware indi­vid­ual. It’s per­son­al­ity that is expressed; the craft is only a medium to do so.

But there’s an impor­tant corol­lary. Over the last year I have begun to sense that the very best art is that per­fect blend of intel­lect and emo­tion. The intel­lec­tual struc­ture is needed, or it is all just a mess. But with­out the emo­tional ele­ment, we have only robotic per­fec­tion. There’s a “just-so” bal­ance to be found which touches our hearts and our minds equally.