Between the Lines

This one's an experiment/challenge. I was reading an article about the nearly(?) lost art of letter writing (Facebook posts and tweets, etc. don't count), and the author said something to the effect of more being written between the lines of real correspondence than on them. I thought, "I think I could probably write something that's completely between the lines." So I did. All of the notes in this piece are in the spaces of the staves, which placed some pretty serious restrictions on what I could write, both melodically and harmonically. No significant scale passages, as I wasn't going to resort to trickery such as consecutive flats and sharps of the same note, or writing an F as an E# or a B as a C-flat (although G-flat/F# and A#/B-flat, etc. swaps were used).

After an initial discarded start in A-flat major, I realized that the high number of both sharps and flats would render a key signature impractical, but it ended up roughly in the related key of F minor anyway, and mostly in 3/4 (using a few 4/4 and 5/4 measures to replace fermatas with more exact durations of some held notes). Still, the rhythm was kept pretty simple as a counterbalance to the relative strangeness of the melodic and harmonic aspects. The whole thing came together over a span of a little over two weeks, including a spell of almost a week during which I was too sick to work on it. I think it's done now.