Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Help for Wedding

Hello guys. My sister wanted me to play some pieces that are appropriate to weddings( in one year time, so i can practice it well even if its hard). Can you guys help me to list out the appropriate pieces( i am going to play for the reception) ? I am going to play for around 4 hours. Thank you in advance.

Are you playing for the ceremony as well as the reception ?

sorry i forgot to put it up, i am going to play for the reception only

The Rite of Spring. Then jump up, scream 'Das Opfer!' and pin the blushing bride to the altar with your sacrifical obsidian dagger.

Or, you could go the conventional route.

Are you just looking for something suitably innocuous/saccharine, or something written with weddings in mind?

Are you wanting appropriate classical music? Or are you thinking popular (song types?)

Actually 4 hours is quite long. On the bright side, you have one year.

I suggest actually brushing up on sight reading, and learning how to play by ear.

Popular melodies with a simple accompaniments (e.g. broken chords and inversions) will help to fill most of the time. Buying a book of wedding music and sight reading it is also helpful.

If you are playing for a reception, you also don't actually want to overpower conversation.

As such show pieces are not appropriate (as are pieces that spend too much time playing loudly in the bass and treble regions) - try some waltzes (e.g. Chopin), and schubert impromptus (Op 90 2/3, Op 142 No 3), Mendelssohn songs without words in addition to the above (e.g. playing popular melodies by ear, and interpersing with classical) and you should be able to fill up the time quite nicely.

Schumann-Liszt Widmung/Schubert-Liszt Ave Maria is quite nice if you want to show off...

4 hours is way long if you are playing pieces that need a lot of preparation. You might want to check out the "Lets talk weddings" thread in the Pianist Cornet, non Classical. It's got lots of great information and would be useful even if you play mainly classical music.

I agree that 4 hours is ridiculous, both in terms of you having to play that long, and in terms of wedding "flow." I've never been to a wedding where anything but the evening dancing lasted remotely close to 4 hours. In all reality, when your sister plans it in greater detail, she'll realize that the reception will not last much longer than an hour. Preparing enough music for that will be much more reasonable.

Wedding traditions, including "receptions" and the definition of "reception" can vary widely from country to country. As Vladimiroir doesn't state where s/he's from, could it be that a reception, there, is indeed four hours long?

Regards,

There are a large number of Wedding Anthologies available online at at retail music stores. I'd suggest getting a couple of those.

I've played at a ton of receptions and some of them for longer than four hours. Get yourself roughly an hour/hour and a half of music that "corresponds" with the affair. Keep your head up and watch and listen to what's going on around you. After a certain point, trust me, you could play "chopsticks" and not many people will notice. I've played through all the Chopin nocturnes, interspersed with Bach chorales, interspersed with movements from Bach suites, interspersed with George Winston, interspersed with...you get the idea (I once threw in a movement from each Beethoven sonata lol). If you know a lot of popular tunes and are lucky to have a friendly crowd at the reception sometimes they make things easy and give you request after request. Receptions are really a great gig and easy money, but my best bit of advice is...make SURE you get paid!

FYI - on another thread a few weeks back the OP stated that he/she was a "14 year old kid" from Malaysia.

So yes - their wedding traditions may be different than ours - as well as the "popular" music that might be performed. Four hours does seem a bit excessive, however. Perhaps the OP could get by with playing one hour of music four times !!!

Bring a book of Mozart sonatas and read through them at a casual tempo, all played piano.. take all the repeats, even the ones at the end of the movements. That's easily 2 hours right there. Then no one will remember the early sonatas, so you can probably get through home stretch no problem.

Chopin Nocturnes, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, Liebestraum, Clair de Lune...idk, too generic? XD

I think that "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen" and "Liebestraum" are too much solo works demanding - and at times even commanding - audience attention. I don't think that they would be appropriate as background music to a reception.

Regards,

Quite right, that was an ethnocentric statement on my part.

Best of luck preparing that much music Vladimiroir!