Guest Post: The Passion – she is contagious

Shannon, here, for an introduction:

As many of you know, I don’t normally accept volunteers for guest posts. Instead, I go out and find writers that I ask to post on my blog. I also sometimes ask those who participate on my author Facebook page or on here to contribute to a guest post as a way to thank those readers and writers for contributing to my websites. That’s what today is: a big thank you to author Sorin Suciu for writing the lovely post you are about to read below. (Fun fact: I asked him to be a guest blogger after he solved a riddle I posted.)

Passion can be a journey that develops and grows overtime, often blurring the edges in between interests. This is a story of a writer who fell for music.

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I grew up with a black and white TV set that only received two channels. On the one hand, there was the Romanian television – a government controlled enterprise that broadcasted for a few hours a day, and which was largely a communist propaganda machine. On the other hand, there was the Bulgarian television – which had better movies and cartoons, and a more forgiving schedule. By the time I was eight years old, I could get by in Bulgarian, mostly thanks to said cartoons.

But I digress. For all their faults, every once in a while, the Romanian television would allow a true gem to get past the merciless eyes of censorship. Amongst them, some of Sergiu Celibidache’s performances.

As a child, I remember regarding this brilliant conductor (whose last name is a tongue twister even by Romanian standards) as a sort of clown who monkeyed around while the orchestra played beautiful music. It might sound frivolous, but to my young self an adult acting like a child was the best thing that the world had to offer. I was absolutely enthralled by his performances, and I would often try to mimic them, much to the delight of my parents.

It would put me in a good light to claim that I was responding to the beautiful mathematics of classical music. In hindsight, however, I guess what I was really reacting to was the passion. A passion so pure and intense that it caused transcendence. The music was there, of course, but passion was without a doubt the main vehicle. Without this vehicle, I doubt my love affair with music would have been anything more than superficial.

Let’s watch together Celibidache’s rendition of Ravel’s Bolero. This is a rare video, where the entire footage is dedicated to the conductor, and with very good cause too, as you will see. Watch him as he undergoes the transformation from stolid Professor Severus Snape, to exuberant Liberace.

Join him in this journey and, once we meet on the other side, tell me how you like classical music now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5Ve3338-E

In the end, here is a tip for readers and writers alike.

Next time you read a book by your favourite author, try to change your focus from the action to the one who is doing the writing. Imagine the author conducting the performance, going through mood swings, getting a glint in the eye as something unexpected is about to happen, smiling as a subtle joke is being crafted, and lying back on the chair as another great chapter is finished.

Writing, I learn more and more every day, is about delivery just as much as it is about creativity. And what better delivery mechanism than passion? Nurture your passion as much as you nurture your creativity.

And don’t forget, passion is contagious. It’s the reason you became an artist in the first place, is it not?

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Sorin Suciu is the author of The Scriptlings. Click the image below for more information. After that, share your passions below. Do you have more than one? Do they often grow from one another? ~SAT