Tomorrow is the day I sing at a friend's wedding. In addition to the aforementioned Ellens Gesang, the priest is also having me do an alleluia (which consists of singing "alleluia" a few times) and a responsorial (which consists of me singing something that the "audience" replies to, also in song).

Not being nor having been raised Catholic, these are not exactly familiar things burned into my memory. After the wedding rehearsal, I took home the church songbook in order to practice the chosen responsorial. Since I read music at about the same level that someone who only knows the alphabet reads normal words, I had to be pretty creative and persistent to figure out which notes were there on the page.

It wasn't until last night that I realized those were only the notes for the chorus that the congregation sings back to me: the verse that I sing by myself was simply printed out in words--there's no music! (I wondered why the 12 notes of the chorus wouldn't accommodate the 16 or 17 syllables of the verse.)

Naturally, I decided I'd just have to make up a verse. I'm very glad that I have that little recording wizard application, because it allowed me to sing and record a line, then pause it, then sing the next line and pause it again while I picked out the notes.

I ended up with an MP3 of the whole song (albeit a bit clumsily sung) as I've written it, so I can burn it to CD and hopefully into my memory as well by listening to it over and over.

Today I will be working at a nearby hospital with a colleague who is collecting research data so I won't have much chance to sit around listening to it before tomorrow, though. Yikes!