I don't see why not

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled –but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

– Edgar Allan Poe

So her schemes always went for nothing, and she laid them aside in impotent rage against the fates, and against herself for playing the fool on that fatal September day in not providing herself with a witness for use in the day when such a thing might be needed for the appeasing of her vengeance-hungry heart.

– Mark Twain

To do work of surpassing excellence, is the best revenge.

– Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

A project sometimes springs, perhaps whimsically, from a chance request.  Thus, my present thought is to take an orchestral number already in my folio, and add to it a spoken narration.  Because, it just may work.

Is such activity a “betrayal” of the music's original “purpose”?  Famously, more than one number of Messiah (undeniably an enduring classic) Handel “upcycled” from earlier work.  And if Barber could make over his justly well-loved Adagio into a choral Agnus Dei, I think I can pursue this rather less radical scheme with a clear conscience.

And I think I have already found the text for the job.

This is but a slight deferral of work on A Heart So White, and in fact is a kind of preparation.  For the first order of business with A H. So Wh. is, to review the fixed media as it stands, and see if it suffices for the pace of dramatic performance of the scene.  I have been morally prepared for the possibility that the fixed media may require some expansion;  and it is high time to try the question – to try the question, and to get on with it.

So with both pieces, I begin by reading text against the music presently in existence, and taking it from there.

Still no word viz. Ear Buds.  It may yet happen.  I am touched that two friends, one yesterday morning, another today, inquired whether I had yet heard anything.  There is such good in our neighbors’ hearts.

My writer friend David made me a gift this morning with a phrase which I think must later become a title:  Chubby Little Book.

In a tone entirely consonant with the blurry magic of the source material, the certainty that I shall ere (very) long at last finish White Nights fills me with a calm elation, which delicately elevates my soul.  A profoundly gratifying satisfaction of a kind which probably no other experience in life could provide.