Wedding Music Tip #14

Sheet Music....and it's ability to fly away.

This tip is really, in all honesty, for the vendor more than the bride and groom. But it's well worth mentioning for anyone involved in providing live music for special events, especially those events which mark the celebration of a (hopefully) one-time life occurrence.

Sheet music. We musicians all use it, whether it's an album full of wedding classics or the score to Rocky which the groom requested as recessional music. (Seriously. It has happened.) What we don't always use, and probably should, is a binder to keep all the music--preferably in the order it will be performed--for each event. I learned this the hard way at a wedding ceremony two weeks ago, a ceremony held at the New York Historical Society. In front of 250 guests, no less.

We were asked to perform a short portion of Handel's Water Music for the lighting of the unity candle. I prepared the music as usual, providing the string quartet with a photocopy of the portion of music we would be performing. We also--and here is the unfortunate part--had copies of music we would be playing later in the ceremony on our stands. A nice rendition of the Bob Dylan song Feel My Love to be exact. Came off very well in the ceremony, actually. But I digress.

When it was time to perform the music for the lighting of the unity candle, the first violinist managed to knock all of her music off the stand, scattering it in a hundred directions. After the dust settled and the air conditioning stopped blowing what remained of one of Handel's biggest hits about the room, I felt like I was looking at the pieces of my career all over the floor. The bride and groom waited patiently as the second violinist assisted in picking up all the parts and putting them more or less back on the music stand--with, mind you, all 250 guests staring at us as if they were witnessing one of the more complicated maneuvers of Cirque de Soleil. It took so long to retrieve the music that the officiant decided to move on to the next part of the ceremony. Not good.

Wedding Tip #14: So, as another string player kindly reminded me after hearing this horror story: Binders are the wedding musician's best friends. FYI.

Until the next wedding,

Alice, Director
www.tenstringsmusicstudio.com