Do your wedding ceremony planning in an order that prevents disappointment or having to go back and redo something.
One of the ways to do this is to make certain fundamental decisions about your ceremony first before thinking too much about music. There are certain ceremony decisions can affect your ceremony music planning even though the decisions themselves aren’t about music.
You don’t want to start planning the music, then make those decisions and end up having go back and redo the music planning!
If you’re about to get started on planning your church wedding ceremony music, make those decisions soon.
The idea when starting your music planning will be to get a good feel for all the various places before, during and after the ceremony where you want music so that you can get down to searching for and planning music for where it’s actually needed.
But first, some of the those basic ceremony decisions that can affect music. Make these decisions before getting too far into your music planning:
- Location of the ceremony
If you don’t know where the ceremony will be, there’s not much point in thinking about music. Once the location is determined, you’ll know your options regarding music (e.g., organ, piano) and the church’s policies about music and musicians.
- Expected attendance
The attendance affects how much music you should plan for as guests are being seated and departing.
- Whether you’ll have a separate bridal processional
- Size of the bridal party
The processional music length can be adapted to roughly match the size of the bridal party
- A receiving line at the church?
This affects how much postlude music you’ll need
- Hymns
Many couples like to include hymns in their wedding ceremonies. You’ll need to coordinate with the church and the musician(s) who will accompany it.
- Special ceremony elements (before or during) where you might want music to be played.
Unity Candle, Lighting of Candles (before the ceremony), Seating of Parents and/or Grandparents are all optional and are places that can have a specific piece of music played.
Get started
There are plenty of music-related decisions to make for the typical traditional wedding ceremony, but these are some important non-musical things to consider early on.
Also consider downloading Wedding Music Unveiled’s wedding music planning checklist to guide you. Look below or near the upper-right corner of our web site to get this valuable tool.
Can you think of anything else that affects music? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts. Your comments are always welcome and appreciated!
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