Least favorite wedding music?
With the previous request for favorite wedding music, it may also be instructive to know readers’ least favorite wedding music selections for the liturgy.
13 Responses to “Least favorite wedding music?”
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“The Wedding Song” aka “There Is Love” by Stuckey.
This may be an urban legend but I have heard stories of “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar being sung as the bride came up the alter.
A quick googling shows this list of “bad ideas”.
http://users.adelphia.net/~markfischer/muzak7.html
“This may be an urban legend but I have heard stories of “I Don’t Know How To Love Him”"
It’s possible that someone might have used the slow movement from the Mendelssohn violin concerto, unaware that ALW ripped it off (perhaps inadvertantly,) for Superstar.
Well, I pretty much put myself through conservatory by singing the Stuckey, so I hate it but am indebted to it. (I had no shame and my parish had no standards — I also sang Sunrise Sunset, Evergreen, and once, Endless Love.)
There’s a song in a number of current hymnals, the tune is O Waly Waly, but I can’t recall who wrote the words — anyway, it speaks of “when love explodes,” and it either gives me fits of the giggles or makes me sick to my stomach, depending on the mood I’m in when I hear it.
I suppose it’s no worse than the “O Promise Mes” and “Becauses” our grandparents loved.
My husband, who is known to improve on the truth when his rep as a raconteur demands it, swears that a man he knew, a singer with whom he had worked, grabbed a mike and surprised his wife-to-be by crooning “(Love’s More Comfortable) The Second Time Around,” to her as she waited to come down the aisle, at an otherwise very staid Episcopalian wedding service.
(“Thank, you thank you very much, we’re hear all week, try the veal….”)
In two Catholic weddings in recent years I have heard (though never been asked to sing or play,) “I Danced in the Morning,” and I both dislike it intensely and fail to see its connection to the proceedings, so if that is some kind of trend at weddings, it would get my vote for “least favorite.”
Least favourites:
“The Wedding Song”, “O Perfect Love”; “My Heart Will Go On” (yes, I’ve actually had to play this!); “She Moved Through the Fair” (sung as the bride processed ); and “Ave Maria” (not the song itself, which is beautiful, but the numerous bad renditions done by singers who ought to know better & by relatives of the bride and/or groom)… If any more come to mind, I’ll let you know!
I actually have heard sung at weddings the following atrocities:
Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man (Showboat)
Endless Love
Wind Beneath My Wings
Among many others which don’t come to mind. Now that I am a parish music director, I deal with much less that offends the ear. I recently had a bride request a couple of horrendous pop tunes, and was quite relieved that we have parish policy in place that allows me to say, “I’m sorry, but we can’t do that.”
This conversation brought up an old memory that I’m going to confess.
A loooooong time ago, when I was too young to say, “NO,” I was asked to play for wedding recessional: “Where’m I goin? I don’t know. When will I get there, I aint certain. All I know is I am on my way. (from Paint Your Wagon).” So I said OK.
And that was also the wedding where they didn’t tell me they were taking flowers to the Blessed Mother (maybe I hadn’t met that tradition, yet), and I was in an unfamiliar church, a mile away in the choir loft.
So, she started walking away from the altar, I panicked and started the horrible song (the song’s not horrible, but on a pipe organ at a wedding it is), and I really don’t know what happened after that.
The song mentioned above (set to O Waly Waly) is called, “When Love is Found”, and I too hate it with a purple passion. Can’t remember offhand who wrote those dreadful words, but they should be sent to Lyricists’ Obedience School to learn the proper way to set words to music! “When love explodes”; “When love is torn” — yuckissimo! I just hold my nose & play …
The hymn “When Love is Found” was written by the Rev. Brian Wren, an Anglican minister. I respectfully disagree with your critical assessment of this text. One will find many of his hymn texts in all of the major RC publisher’s hymnals, which attests to the careful and professional reviews by a number of editors of varied backgrounds. Suggesting that Mr. Wren “should be sent to Lyricist’s Obedience School” is a de facto “ad hominem” attack that is paradoxical in that the poster, herself, used “yuckissimo!” to abet her argument.
I also suggest that when reviewing a hymn text, one should examine the whole text dialectly and thoroughly, rather than by excerpting phrases that are personally distateful to the reviewer.
“One will find many of his hymn texts in all of the major RC publisher’s hymnals, which attests to the careful and professional reviews by a number of editors of varied backgrounds.”
Is this meant as irony? Surely no one seriously offers a text’s presence in numerous “Catholic” hymnals as evidence that it must, ipso facto, be good, (or Catholic, for that matter.)
I do like some of Wren’s texts, very much indeed, but the one rhapsodizing about “when love explodes and fills the sky,” is, as Miss Gonzalez so eloquently put it, yuckissimo.
Back to the least favorite song topic…a strange one that I tried to talk the wedding couple out of but couldn’t was the U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” They were big U2 fans and refused to see that the sentiments were extremely inappropriate for a wedding.
I had my first request for “Be Not Afraid” for a wedding, at a meeting with the frightene— er, I mean HAPPY couple over the weekend.
Definitely “The Wedding Song.” It should be banned, burned, annihilated…and I hate singing it. I’ve successfully talked everybody except for my cousin out of having it sung at their weddings.
A recent trend that’s annoying me no end is the proliferation of funereal songs at weddings. People are being advised to have “On Eagle’s Wings” as a Communion hymn. Besides the fact that the piece is just disgustingly overdone and usually done at funerals, it has NO connection whatsoever to the celebration of the Eucharist. The other one that people seem to want all the time is “You Are Mine.” The text really is inappropriate for a wedding in my mind.
I actually *like* “You Are Mine” for a wedding. The Catholic sacrament of marriage is largely about the relationship not only of one spouse to another but the relationship of the two become one to the Church and to God — it seems fitting to sing a hymn about God’s love for and promise to the married couple.
Perhaps my biggest pet peeve as a wedding cantor who often assists the music director at my parish in planning wedding music is the insistence of many couples on entirely inappropriate secular music. When we schedule a consultation we note in the letter that the Catholic rite of marriage does not permit non-liturgical music and that we’ll be happy to work with them to choose appropriate hymns. Many if not most couples are happy to work with us; but, of course, the bizarre American wedding mythology that says that a wedding is really just an excuse for a woman to be a mini-dictator for a day convinces many women that they are entitled to whatever they want. This included a woman who thought it would be cute and funny to play Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Woman” over the speaker system after she and her husband were prounounced man and wife. That was the worst example. Some couples profess that they “really aren’t into the ‘church music’ thng and want all of the singing to be of songs they like — Marc Cohn’s “True Companion,” James Taylor’s “Shower the People,” or even Elton John’s “The One.” We’ve had women storm out of the consultation in tears when we told her we couldn’t permit her to walk down the aisle with her father to the strains of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?” blaring from the speakers.