Around where I come from (New York) the music for when the bride walks down the aisle is always ‘Bridal Chorus‘ from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, and the music when the new couple runs off is Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ (With maybe a dozen of the exact same exceptions including Bach’s Jesu Joy.)
Not my own, however. I picked a favorite classical piece that I wanted for the middle of the mass, and the choir director switched it and played it at the exit. This is a sore point for me because then I didn’t get to hear it since I was outside shaking hands during the whole thing. (I had a full classical choir at my wedding, and it was this gorgeous a capella piece with six part harmony and…nevermind.) However, it also meant that Mendelssohn wasn’t playing. Yay, for bucking tradition!
Don’t get me wrong. I love Felix Mendelssohn. And Wagner is hilariously dramatic. But why does everyone have to have the same music? What can a geeky couple choose for their classical wedding music? Depends on the mood of your wedding.
Let’s say you want dramatic. For your bride’s walk, you could choose a tune that brings to mind warrior maidens:
And for the couple’s happy trip back down the aisle to dominate the world:
If you like noble, let’s try this. You could even ask someone to do a British Accent saying:
Marriage: the final frontier. This is the voyage of the relationship (INSERT NAMES HERE.) Their continuing mission: to explore each other’s strange habits, to create new life without destroying our civilization, to boldly go where many geeks have gone before.
and the couple can go off into the universe with style:
Perhaps you’re more lighthearted. Here’s a good one to dance up the aisle with:
And the couple can usher people to the party with this:
Those are my geeky picks. Imagine a bride and groom reading this right now and needing help. Did you have some alternative wedding music? Do you have suggestions? Post them below!
We used the ost from an anime we both loved. Great suggestions and videos 🙂
I walked down the aisle to the theme from An Affair To Remember (Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr), it was a special song for us and I couldn’t bear the thought of the Bridal March. A friend sang Amazing Grace while we took communion together.
I can’t believe the choir director switched the music on you! I’m horribly upset for you and I don’t even know you! I understand that there are times a musician or choir director needs to try and encourage brides and grooms to picking things more appropriately or where they will work, but at the end of it, it is your day, and it should be done the way you want it. (If it had been me I would have ended up either ticked off or crying in the middle of the service when the “wrong” music was played…) Am making a mental note to myself that if I have that much music (I really kind of do want the choir myself) that I make sure they’re aware that there will NOT be any changes to the order as approved by the bride and groom!
Thank you! I tried so hard not to be a demanding bride, but as a musician, that was really the only thing I asked for (my mom planned the rest because I didn’t care.)
*sniff* It’s nice to know I have a right to be sad.
Our ceremony was too short for music, but during lunch, we had a nice background set of Final Fantasy, Chrono Chross, and Chrono Trigger music.
A friend of mine ended his wedding with the theme to Indiana Jones.
I couldn’t bear the thought of the “traditional” wedding music, much to my mother’s dismay. Since the Husbandly One’s and my wedding was in December, we chose Christmas music from Mannheim Steamroller, and opted for two acoustic numbers rather than the synthesized stuff. “The Holly and the Ivy” to walk in, and “Wassail, Wassail,” to walk out. It really fit the SCA crowd and gamers that attended our wedding!
All of our wedding music was from Battlestar Galactica.
Oh how I love creative wedding music! What a row my (first) husband and I started when it became clear we were not bowing to every tradition set forth by a thousand brides and grooms before us. It was worth every tear-soaked argument with the Mother-in-Law, and by the time the wedding rolled around, and nearly everyone applauded our completely apropos choices, M-I-L included.
I walked down the aisle to the opening bars of Pink Floyd’s “In the Flesh”. Insane drums and that unbelievable guitar riff? Oh yes please. The best part? The bridesmaids had gone ahead to Canon in D, so the change in music was quite the surprise.
For the exit, my then-husband, in a nod to his inner Star Wars geek with a different choice – The Throne Room score from A New Hope. The whole thing was awesome!
For the record, pretty much everything else was your standard wedding – suits, flowers, a long white gown with a cathedral length train and veil. It just made our geeky touches stand out all the more.
I have no idea what our wedding music was. Maybe Pachabel’s Canon? I can’t remember picking anything, I was so stressed about planning that I. Did. NOT. CARE. We did dance to Storybook Love, from The Princess Bride. Perfect for two fans of the movie who are also major bookworms! (I mean c’mon, I’m a librarian and the third time I saw this guy, it was at a bar and he had one of Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials books!)
We used the Theme Song from Forrest Gump for our entrance to the reception.
I play in a steel drum band and weddings – particularly at this time of year – are our bread and butter. I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve had to play the Wagner and Mendelssohn, though we do occasionally do the Wagner as a reggae and the Mendelssohn as a calypso rather than straight-up classical transcriptions, but still…. Oh, and there’s also Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”, which is gorgeous on steel drums, but still overdone at weddings.
Occasionally we get the awesome weddings, though. For example, there was the music composition grad student who had written an arrangement of Marian’s Theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark and asked if we could play that for the entrance of his wife-to-be. How could we not?!?
These are great!
Music is a really important thing to us so I spent months agonising over music that would sum us up!
I sent my bridesmaids down to the intro/outro (cut and edited together in Audacity by myself) of “At My Most Beautiful” by REM.
I wanted something traditional but with a twist so I walked to the Wedding March BUT the version from Flash Gordon, as played by Queen (listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pqn8PLJLtQ) who just happen to be my hubby and father-in-law’s favourite band. My FIL had been trying to convince someone in the family to use it for years, I kept it a surprise, he was so happy that he whispered “thank you” as I passed him going down the aisle!
We exited to the theme music from the Fantasmic! show at Disneyland (beginning with the big fanfare) as we’re both huge Disney fans.
Our first dance was another obscure Disney song, Promise by Kellie Coffey which is used in a slightly varied form during Illuminations at EPCOT. They play the version we danced to when the fireworks end which was amazing as we went to WDW on our honeymoon so we got to hear our first dance song playing as we stood by the lake.
I walked in to “Beloved One” by Ben Harper and walked out (husband in tow, naturally) to “Feeling Good” by Michael Buble. Both captured seriousness without being a total cliche (or a current fad, ugh).
Some friends of mine walked out to “Can’t get enough of you baby” by smashmouth, which seems like a good idea – except that they’d spent the entire ceremony weeping and gazing at one another, so it didn’t fit the mood.
Louise Curtis
Haha I went to a wedding this weekend where they played the music from the ceremony at the end of “A New Hope” when the couple walked back in. As someone who plays a lot of weddings, I despise the normal wedding march and canon in D, etc. I’m not sure I could go full on geek for my eventual ceremony, but I do pray to be Rick-rolled during the tedious first dance!!! 😀
‘I Do’, from Yoko Kanno’s score for the Ghost in the Shell anime series. Both highly-appropriate AND a great geek inside joke for me and my nerdy friends. Would have had Kanno for our whole wedding soundtrack if my wife had let me! (Well, would have kept the Paul Simon / Ladysmith recording of Amazing Grce
‘I Do’, from Yoko Kanno’s score for the Ghost in the Shell anime series. Both highly-appropriate AND a great geek inside joke for me and my nerdy friends. Would have had Kanno for our whole wedding soundtrack if my wife had let me! (Well, would have kept the Paul Simon / Ladysmith recording of Amazing Grace.)
Friends of ours recessed to “Roly Poly Fishheads.” Hilarious
I’ll stick with my geeky pick. I walked down the aisle to a piece from Lohengrin, but it was not the typical Bridal Chorus. It was Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral, a competition piece that my high school band had played that introduced me to opera. I had a short ceremony and the only music during the ceremony was Depeche Mode’s Sombody, which made both my siblings intensely jealous because I got to use it first. I walked out to Pachelbell’s Canon- typical, but another piece I had played in instrumental competition.
We’re getting married in Capri on the cliff side and were trying to arrange a “three waiters” show, but alas couldn’t organize it. So a mandolinist playing Italian love songs is what we have settled for.