Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner - Non Classical Let's Talk Weddings

I've just had a flashback of what was likely the first wedding I ever played. I was probably 19 or 20. We were not a wedding band.

The catering hall was in Brooklyn, New York. The manager came up to us and gave us the names of all the members of the wedding party. The size of the paper and the creative penmanship made it look like it came off a prescription pad.

We assumed we were supposed to announce the people as they came in. Wrong. There was a "Welcome Song" that opened every party at this place. They were shocked that we didn't know it. The manager sang it to us as best she could. I can still remember it.


Here comes Uncle Phil
Walking down the aisle
Here comes Uncle Phil
Wearing a great big smile
Wish him well
Bring him in
Come and join the rest
Wish him all the very best


...or something very much like that. In each verse "Uncle Phil" would be replaced by the next name on the list. I came up with some sort of jaunty accompaniment and our guitarist was going to sing it.

It already sounds pretty goofy, right? Well, there were a lot of names on the list, so imagine the goofyness going on for a long time. We had more and more trouble keeping our composure as the parade went on. Add to that the fact that many of the names were not nearly as rhythmically fluid as "Uncle Phil". Try fitting "Doctor and Mrs. Marty Silverburg" into three shuffle eighth notes.

Many of the names were barely legible. Human memory is apparently aided by absurdity, because after thirty years I can still remember that one couple's names were "Vidgie and Joe", at least according to our guitarist. In retrospect, it was more likely "Vicki".

This thread is really awakening some long dormant brain cells.

I like Vidgie and Joe. If they don't own a restaurant chain, they should.

Greg, my dad has played a lot of weddings where he has been given a loooooong list of guest names to mention. Dad (the jazz drummer) is also quite the comedian, so he works the names into the song THAT OLD GANG OF MINE and then insults everyone on the list, which, comedy being comedy, always manages to make people laugh. I've got him lurking on this thread, and I know I'll hear him laughing (all the way from Pittsburgh) when he reads your line about fitting "Dr. and Mrs. Marty Silverburg" into three shuffle eighth notes.

I do believe that Dr. and Mrs. Marty Silverburg, along with Vidgie and Joe, show up at every wedding. And Uncle Phil, he's always there, too, a little tipsy and boring everyone to tears with long speeches about the day the bride received her first tricycle.

Last night (Sunday), we played a...well I don't know what to call it. It was apparently a charity event, held at a church we played at once before. There was a concert of opera favorites in the church proper, followed by a not-quite-dinner featuring our decidedly different material.

The not-quite-dinner consisted of a table full of cheese and crackers, hors d'oeuvres served by a team of 11 year old boys from the parish and a twenty-foot array of every cake and pie in Brooklyn. I don't imagine the charity was for diabetes or cardiac health.

The priest, who some may remember from upthread, once again applied his flexible rhythmic sense to a song he came up to sing, "All of Me":

...Take my lips
I want to lose them
Take my arms
I'll never use them...

We only needed to make one course correction this time, leaving 2 beats out of a measure shortly before the sax solo. Here's a tip for any of you who might occasionally accompany an amateur singer; make sure to insert an instrumental break into the song. Consider it a "reset" button; a chance to put things right before the singer goes off the rails entirely.

He's got a good voice and the song was a big hit. It helped liven up a Sunday evening affair, which is no small achievement.

Last night my dad played at a Pittsburgh event called UKRAINIAN MAN OF THE YEAR. It was not a wedding, but it might as well have been.

I played a wedding over the weekend but it was perfect and easy and no one, not even the clipboard lady, was rude or obnoxious.

On Sunday night I read (along with another actress) the HERE COMES THAT BRIDE chapter from Piano Girl. No big deal, except I did it in German—a first for me.

I have another show on Thursday, and I'll have to play ALL OF ME for one part of the reading. Greg, I'll be thinking of the priest's lyrics!

Those 20 foot long cake buffets just make me crazy. I mean, I love a nice cupcake as much as the next guy, but too many baked goods on one table? Not good. When I worked at the Mariott Marquis in Manhattan they put the cake buffet ON the grand piano. Horrible. I could play a glissando and dip into the coconut icing all with one flick of the wrist.

I remember the Marriott Letters: the place with the dummy in a tuxedo "playing" a PianoDisc. At least it didn't complain to the management about turning the piano into an oyster bar, and you know how those people love "no back-talk," even if it costs them an extra ten large (plus tux). I haven't stepped foot in a Marriott since, though I'm kind of "on the fence" about back-talk myself. Just the other day, I found myself telling a clerk in a store, "Mmmm, edgy--- I like that in a shopclerk." Shameful, I know... yet I don't feel too bad about it.

There used to be an airplane that flew back and forth over Myrtle Beach, S.C. trailing a sign urging beach-goers to, "Eat A Foot-Long Hot Dog!!" I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt the message might be, perhaps, deliberately ambiguous. Many people brag about eating a foot-long hotdog, but they are transparent liars in practically all cases. But there's nothing ambiguous about a twenty-foot-long cake, even in these times when Competitive Eating seems to be on its way to the Olympics.

I think I already explained how visualizing the doughnut around my waistline helped blunt my craving for the fattening breakfast treat, though I'm a fan of coconut icing. Vanity can save you from things that are a lot worse, if you have to take your pick of the Seven Deadly Sins. Still not enough? Visualize my mom living six years after a series of strokes, and still keeping up the compulsive overeating until she weighed close to 300 pounds. We're not talking about zipping up ballgowns here. She was lovely as a young woman; there was no sign of warning. So, now that my doc has started to nag pretty bad about taking off twenty pounds, I think of her. I do not think of twenty-foot-long cakes, or even foot-longs. Well... maybe once in awhile.

I have tried, really tried, to be good... about my attitude toward weddings. But it's so hard to be nice, when you're not. Still, I didn't post the last of the little morceaux. It was more of the same, except for the rat trap. Think your pedal technique is good enough to kick one into the wedding planner's path, just as you strike up a mambo rendering of Three Blind Mice? These subtle touches make all the difference; through them a performance rises to art.

Grieg has been getting my attention. Some of his Lyric Pieces strike me as lovely wedding music. They're moving enough harmonically to give the mother of the bride something to boo-hoo about shamelessly, yet rhythmically alive enough to give the father just the right piece to dance with the bride. Grieg was madly popular as a concert performer, in his day. Some of the critics looked down their noses, but the public loved him, his publisher treasured him, and every impresario was after him for bookings. No, it wasn't the get-down number that Love Shack is, but why go there in every set; even honeymooners take a breather. As I was saying, it's the subtleties. You might ask, "And how would you know?" but that's a subject for another post. I don't always throw gasoline on the bonfire. Not always.

I had a different role at weddings as a Presbyterian minister. Since I always loved "Marryin' Sam" in the Little Abner comic strips, who went all out for a "two dollar wedding," I always wanted to do a wedding for $2.

In a ministry to needy people in our community, I found a couple who had lived together for years, had children, but had never married because they could not afford a wedding. I offered to marry them in our lovely little country church for $2, and they took me up on the offer. I even talked my wife into playing the organ. She prepared about 15 minutes of music.

The bride was 45 minutes late to the wedding, with my wife madly improvising the whole time for a very restless congregation of about 40 of their friends. I was just about to call off the wedding and close up the church when she walked in.

That had a lot to do with my decision to stop doing weddings.

I played "Marryin' Sam" in my Junior High School school play, complete with a black suit and my very best Dogpatch accent. I can still remember one of my lines:

Daisy: (played by a girl acknowledged as the pinnacle of ninth-grade perfection)
"Look at me Sam, I'm plumb wasted away"

Sam: (who was told by our director to give Daisy a long, and longing, look up and down before delivering the line)
"Mebbe so, but what you got left over is more than mos' folks starts out with".

I can hear this in my head, with a coro of "Tres ratones ciegos" in harmony. It fits beautifully. O for a life of idle wealth; I'd have 20 pieces playing my arrangement on YouTube by week's end, and a link on PW.

Don, I love your $2.00 wedding story. I would love to read your wife's take on that very long 45 minute set she played while waiting for the bride to show. Perhaps she did her own version of Three Blind Mice.

"I can hear this in my head, with a coro of "Tres ratones ciegos" in harmony. It fits beautifully. O for a life of idle wealth; I'd have 20 pieces playing my arrangement..."

And that is why God invented MIDI, for musicians who want to dream big on a budget. When MIDI first came out I thought it was some kind of girdle or newfangled pantyhose, just hearing the name. But, no.

The sound of the trap being sprung could add some snap to the mixdown.

**********

After a quick Google, I realized it calls for a PS:


PS--- A very old tune, predating 1609 (when it was first published) with lyric made over to mock Mary Stuart's coercively authoritarian religious regime, Three Blind Mice has had a longer run than I could have imagined... and if you think a little tune about being blinded, gutted, and burned at the stake is going too far already, stay away from Mary Mary Quite Contrary. Talk about getting down. At least in those days, they had a pretty good idea of what pre-school children really like. Three Blind Mice has had treatments in "serious music," movie themes, and was sung by fans at baseball games to mock umpires (formerly three in number) until the League had to step in, in the name of sportsmanship. And now we have the Wedding Planner Mambo.

Its energy and persistence are such that it makes me suspect that it may be a facet of some archetype. Anyway, Happy Birthday, Three Blind Mice: you just may be around to celebrate another four hundred.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice
http://www.rhymes.org.uk/three_blind_mice.htm
http://www.rhymes.org.uk/mary_mary_quite_contrary.htm

"Triolets, villanelles, rondelles, rondeaux,"
That's the one; "Three Blind Mice" is a rondelle

I love this thread! Haven't visited in a while and there's lots of great new stories. Somebody should publish them as a guidebook for every aspiring musician to read

Well I've just played my third wedding ceremony, again it was for friends. Thankfully my friends are all thoroughly decent folks, no bridezillas.

My friends are also fairly slack about what music gets played. They had two requests for me, an Air by Handel and Pachelbel's Canon for the bride. The rest I basically got to play whatever I liked so I'd prepared a bunch of light, pretty classical pieces.

As it's coming time to head to the church, I noticed my shirt and pants were both wrinkled to heck though... Then I was in a bit of a panic, as I don't have an iron. I had to quickly drive to my parents place, and much thanks to my stepmom who gave it all a quick iron while I pulled up www.tie-a-tie.net.

I actually got a call from the groom as I was driving to the church: "Hey, where are you?", "SORRY I'M JUST PULLING INTO THE PARKING LOT!". I was just barely late, guests showing up with no music, cutting it pretty close. Marched right up to the piano and launched into some Haydn. Maybe it would have been better to show up looking like a slob, but a punctual slob.

It was a smaller, quieter crowd than the last time I played, so it felt less like I was playing just for myself, but still doesn't feel too pressured to play in the background like that. A little girl was dancing and spinning to the Mozart

Music for the ceremony went off well. It's all about timing things out. Unfortunately the bride got down the aisle faster than I was hoping - didn't get to play some of the juicier bits of Pachelbel (I should have told her to wait in the back for a bit after the Canon started playing). Otherwise, I'm starting to get the hang of paying close attention to coordinate the music to the ceremony. It's a nice feeling to get a smooth cadence just as they're finishing up. Makes it look like I know what I'm doing :P

Now I must get ready for the second half of the wedding - eating food and drinking beers with everybody! When sober up sometime next week I'll have to stop in and catch up reading some pages of stories here. Keep 'em coming!

Barring an uncommonly slow bride with ill-fitting shoes, you pretty much need a cathedral to get a whole piece in. I'm thinking the Jeopardy TV show theme might be a good substitute.

I'll take "Brides for 500," Alex.

Not the way I figure it.

We have a saying: Half an hour early is ON TIME. On time is LATE. and late? Well, doesn't even bear thinking about.

Sounds harsh, maybe, but if you want to keep getting calls it's a pretty good rule of thumb.

In fact, it will pretty much guarantee you'll get the call over somebody who plays better, sometimes much much better.

Robin: "I'll take "Brides" for 500, Alex."

Alex: "And the answer is: a film in which "Tina Turner" dumped LSD into the punchbowl, and "Mamie Eisenhower" took drunk and fell into the wedding cake."

(there is a long and thoughtful pause)

DING!

Alex: "Robin!"

Robin: "What is Trisha's Wedding, Alex?"

Alex: "That is--- correct!"

(mad applause; the winner jumps up and down excitedly; she has come from behind and cleaned the competition's clock)

Alex: "And now it's time for--- Double Jeopardy! And the categories are..."

You're absolutely right Tim, what's harsh is causing somebody stress on their big day. My intention was 15 mins early, but your half hour minimum sounds better, not to mention having everything ready to go (suitwise, transportationwise) the night before. Lesson learned!

I have been known to make little musical "comments" during our jobs. The "Jeopardy" theme is good filler for when our drummer needs a moment to persuade a balky pedal to behave. I also find myself using "If I Only Had a Brain" pretty often. "The Teddy Bears Picnic" and "C'e La Luna" can be bodged in between verses of "The Bride Cuts the Cake". Other things just seem to pop into my consciousness on the spur of the moment. Sometimes you need a bit of nonsense on a gig.

Double Jeopardy:

I'll take obnoxious musical requests for 800, Alex.

The Teddy Bears Picnic--- now, that takes me back, and further than I would have thought: 102 years. Covered by Procol Harum, featured in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, quoted by Strapping Young Lads in Satan's Ice Cream Truck, and played daily on BBC's air for many years as a sound check. The tune sounds innocent enough, but the lyric is actually kind of scary.

The composer's name is forgotten, and might as well stay that way. This is already confusing enough; when Greg caroled out "The bride cuts the cake," I was ready to chime in with "Ee-i-ee-i-o," but that is a different song. The Collect actually goes, "High Ho the Derry-O."

I suppose Harold Arlen's If I Only Had a Brain might be thought to add a satiric touch to those otherwise slack moments while the bride is wielding the cake knife, but it's actually a sweet little number. Harold Arlen, a considerable talent who penned such career-making favorites for Judy Garland as Over the Rainbow, The Man Who Got Away, Get Happy, Blues in the Night, and for others Paper Moon, Lydia the Tattooed Lady, That Old Black Magic, and (we come full-circle) The Farmer Takes a Wife, was once the roommate of Ray Bolger, who replaced Buddy Ebsen as Tin Man after the silver make-up made Buddy break out in a dreadful rash.

If these topics had not already been mentioned in this thread, I'm sure I would dare not venture upon them. But, as Perry Mason was always saying, "Your Honor, the prosecution opened the door," and as the judge would always reply, "Mr. Burger, your objection is overruled. The witness may answer."