S3/E2 Looking back

This WordPress blog began in that singular year 2019 at the inception of my op. 83, a work for three guitars, which ended up being my sole composition that year. In S1/E2, I wrote “I thought I might mark the occasion in real time on my Facebook page, but as I gathered my thoughts I realized that they would have strained that particular medium.” Alas! I lost touch with this insight last year at the tail end of pandemic restrictions being imposed by either self or society. So many of us were using social media to keep in touch even with family and nearby friends and acquaintances that it made concentrated work on blogging seem impersonal and exclusive.

The present S3 will mostly represent a course correction in which the many blog-like entries interpolated into my Facebook profile regarding the development of my op. 91 opera are tidied up here, where they belong! On social media I get the full range of readers, from those who have little interest in my composer’s career to those who have little else. At this point the Facebook material about the opera is hard to access among all my other many posts, and besides, some of my followers eschew the social media giant altogether.

S1 was complete in itself, a good chronicle of the guitar trio from its very inception to the finish line, and its musical examples well illuminated the fine points I wanted to underscore.

S2 was supposed to have been about the work’s making its way into the world. After an initially auspicious reception we hit the mural (as in wall-like) pandemic. With lives being lost, careers being shattered, groups and ensembles broken apart, I regarded it (correctly) as self-indulgent to whine about the fate of my trio no-one had asked for. (I recall poignantly ruing a red-letter day on Facebook when a big orchestral work of mine had been slated for performance by a major French orchestra. I decided to put up a recording of it from a few years earlier, and explained how it was brought to mind after I took notice of the date. I was roundly criticized for this; that’s how bad things were.)

So, after a certain, frustrating point nothing seemed appropriate to be blogging about here and S2 remained incomplete, unrealized. It’s possible that my failure to return here when I decided to do something similar with the opera was owing to the chagrin I retained from that episode in my life. But a life lesson I have managed to learn is always to use the best tool for a given job. And this forum is indeed the best way to interact with those who want to know something about Akhtamar and its origins.