Preparing A Wedding Programme

Having numerous requests to play for weddings before, I am currently considering to assemble a wedding programme. Think of the money involved. Guess I can't help but be practical. There really isn't any meaningful reason to be engaged to perform in such weddings, but I sure don't like the idea of seeing them walking away with disappointment. Now the question, what would be my programme consist of?

A conversation that occurs so very frequently to me just struck me at this point.

Friend: Hey, can you play the song Wonderful Tonight? (Or other similarly martian-sounding titles like Penny Lane. I have to admit out of the millions of titles I was requested to play, I could only remember these two.)

Me (Quizzical Look): Huh? What's that?

Friend (Exasperated Expression): Oh my, that's such a common song, for goodness sake!

Me: Common song? (Are they from Mars or something? Suggest some German Lieders back at them? No, they probably don't know them. Let's try some French chansons, any retard will probably be familiar with them.) Well, I know L'Hymne A L'Amour, or Ne Me Quitte Pas, or Revoir Paris or maybe Plasir D'Amour. (They sure look weirder. Ok, let's try something easier.) And I know songs like Fly Me To The Moon and Over The Rainbow.

Friend (Indescribable Expression): Eh, maybe you need to listen to the radio more often.

Me (Raising an eyebrow): Oh, probably so. (Silently thinking: Who's the one who needs to listen to the radio now? I'm not even talking about classical music. Duh...)

Well, even if I were to assemble a wedding programme, I guess the pieces I mentioned above will be what I'll be playing, together with certain hymnal arrangements. I've gone through the my collection of sheet music containing such music and have certain heart melting pieces in mind. I'm a little stumped at the level of such arrangements as they can easily require a higher, if not the same, technical level than the diploma pieces. Well, I can't really expect lesser if I'm going to choose arrangements by the legendary Roland Dyens, can I? Even hymnal arrangements played by Christopher Parkening can be exceedingly taxing as well.

Well, the good thing is that even if I haven' been approached to play for weddings, I would still like to pick up these pieces...

I'm giving myself a year to assemble an hour of programme of such level...