On playing with my organ at a wedding

Wedding season is upon us, and I really like wedding season. First of all, I get to sleep in on Sundays. See, there is no choir at my church for the summer. Besides the fact that a significant portion of the congregation spends their summers in Greece, once you start adding summer vacations and kids’ sporting events (baseball games & soccer matches are always scheduled for Sundays, oftentimes a great drive away, and, of course, for many, football is the only religion needed on a Sunday), you just don’t know what type of choir you’ll have. One week, we might have a well-balanced 20 person choir & sound great. The next, we might have an alto & two tone-deaf tenors…and that would, um, not sound great.

So, I get to sleep in on Sundays, which is marvelous. But, I also get to play weddings, which is a great way to make money. I charge a competitive rate for my area, but “competitive rate” is more money per hour than I’d make programming away, and it’s money that just kind-of appears. When budgeting for a family, the sudden appearance of cash is always appreciated.

Playing a wedding usually requires that I prepare an hour’s worth of music. About 20-30 minutes before the wedding, as the guests start to arrive, I’ll start playing¹, then I’ll play somewhere between one and three processionals (the most I’ve played included a processional for grand-parents/parents, then one for the bridal party, and then one for the bride – though most weddings have two processional pieces: the bridal party & a separate one for the bride). Most services I play, for the service itself, I’m playing Angry Birds silent – and then there is the bridal party recessional, and then between 5 and 30 minutes of exit music as the congregation exits.

Like most organists, I kind-of get bored with the music for most weddings. Don’t get me wrong, the music is beautiful, but think of your favorite book or movie or song. Then, think that you had to read/watch/listen to it every single day². It would start to become tiresome.

For about 75% of my weddings, I play (I’d include links to me playing each of these, but that would require a fair amount of work, so it’ll be some time before I can):

• Bridal Party Processional: Pachelbel’s Canon in D
• Bridal Processional: Wagner’s Bridal Chorus (from Lohengrin) alternately titled “Here Comes the Bride”³
• Bridal Recessional: Mendelssohn’s Wedding March (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Every now & then, you run across couples who want to change things up. Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary and a few Johan Sebastian Bach pieces: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Air on the G String⁴, and Sheep May Safely Graze, and, purely as a recessional, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (from his 9th Symphony) are almost always the “change up” pieces. And, they’re all beautiful pieces, every one, but that doesn’t really fix the “want to do something new.”

The way to combat the “always playing the same thing” is to start playing new stuff for the entrance & exit music. First, I play some of my own compositions. That I’ve never been “called out” for playing something inappropriate when I’ve done this tells me that either I’m either playing to a roomful of people who don’t pay attention to what I’m playing or that my own music is half decent. And, yes, I know I need to include recordings of my stuff – I’ll work on that soon. Then, I’m always trying to find new arrangements (so the music is “new to me”) of the music that I regularly play, but I know people want to hear.

Then, every once in awhile, I have situations like the wedding I’m playing at the end of this month. When the wedding doesn’t necessarily take place in a church. And while it’s a “wedding” in every sense of the word, there aren’t the regular rules. The guidance I received was to play:

• Bridal Party Processional: Storybook Love (from The Princess Bride)
• Bridal Processional: La Vie en Rose

After some back & forth, the bridal recessional will be Can You Read My Mind?, the Love Theme from Superman. The couple really wanted something from John Williams, but was afraid of coming across as “too geeky,” especially if we played something straight out of Star Wars. This seemed the best compromise.

With the service music all locked up, I now need to fill in the entrance & exit music. So far, I have

• Wedding Day, by yours truly (yeah, I know I need to record these things so that you can hear them)
• Book of Love by the Magnetic Fields (but made more popular by the cover from Peter Gabriel)
• Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen
• Everything I Do (I Do It For You) by Bryan Adams
• She’s Got a Way and She’s Always a Woman by Billy Joel
• Where Do I Begin?,the Theme from Love Story
• A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum (because I need to somehow get Air on the G String into the event)

But, I need more. So, suggestions from the peanut gallery?

And, while these selections seem a bit “out there” for a wedding, this is far from the oddest wedding I played – I swear, I played Rick Springfield’s Jesse’s Girl as the recessional at a wedding of (you guessed it) a couple where the groom’s name was Jesse.

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¹ For a Greek wedding, if both sides of the wedding party are Greek, I might start playing as late as 10 minutes before the wedding is supposed to start…and then continue playing up-to half an hour after the wedding was supposed to start. See, Greeks and promptness go together as well jackhammers and throw-pillows

² I’m well aware that I’ll soon be entering a phase where my kids want to watch the same movie over & over & over & over & over again every day. In fact, they’re already requesting the same books over & amp; over & over again. So, I’m willing to admit, for toddlers, the idea of getting “bored” with something is different . . . but play with me here.

³ Not to go all composer-geek on you, but few composers piss me off like Wagner does (except for Aaron Copeland – I really dislike him). First, he was an antisemite, but he thought operas should take longer & longer & longer. As a performer, you get tired on stage. As an audience member, well, it’s difficult to keep your focus as the details are actually explored. It’s best to say “I saw you & I fell in love” than to actually explore the relationship on the stage. On top of all of this, the actual story of Lohengrin makes it kind-of interesting that it’s likely the most-played piece in Christian weddings.

⁴ Yeah, the 12 year old in me is giggling at the “G String” reference