The advent of the month of May is like the gunshot which signals the start of the 20, give or take a few, week wedding season around this country.
As someone who is playing in several weddings over the next few years, may I suggest to all you happily engaged couples that you listen when the person providing music for your ceremony gently suggests not using Pachelbel's Canon in D, or any of the traditional songs you hear at weddings.
First of all, this is a day you want to remember so you should pick something that is special to you. Maybe I'm a musical snob, but using Pachelbel, Trumpet Voluntary, the wedding march (any version), or Jesu, Joy of Man's Desire is about as unoriginal as you can get when it comes to wedding music. I'd throw in Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Handel's Water Music but you almost never hear those played even though they're quite lovely tunes.
If you have a talented enough musician, you might even be able to convince them to do something modern under the guise of it being a "classical" tune. I'm still trying to figure out if I could learn some of "Satellite" by Dave Matthews Band to play for a couple whose music taste runs more along DMB, Bob Marley, and Led Zeppelin than Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn.
I may have posted this video below before, but it bears repeating because this guy really gets the point across when it comes to Pachelbel's Canon.
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2 comments:
Never seen that video before. Love it!
Let's also remind those happy couples out there not to wait until the week before the wedding to tell their musicians what they would like played, and then request something outrageously difficult or so obscure that the music is impossible to find. BAD form. Your musicians may charge you A LOT extra if that occurs.
At the last wedding I did, which was in February, I had to play the Pachelbel, Jesu, AND Spring from the Four Seasons. It was sheer agony.
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