Buy the Ultimate Church Wedding Music Planner, a bargain at less than £2 - click through to Amazon to either buy or download a sample
There is nothing better to accompany a wedding than an organ, but it isn't always possible to get an organist. These albums contain music for the arrival of the bride, accompaniments for popular wedding hymns and worship songs, interludes and the exit of the bride and groom. 51 beautifully played tracks.
You can buy both volumes of Organ Music for Weddings as a 2 CD set - or you can download the tracks you need from iTunes or Amazon. You can also hear samples of all the tracks at iTunes or Amazon.
If you want more choice for before and after, during the processions or during the signing, take a look also at our Organ Miscellany CD. This features 22 extra organ pieces from well known music like the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria and Haydn's St Anthony Chorale to some secret gems that will make your wedding special. Available as a CD or as downloads from iTunes or Amazon.
It's difficult to find a single CD that has a good selection of both background music and hymns to get some inspirations for a wedding - this is probably the best choice around. There are the inevitable Wagner & Mendelssohn wedding marches, with several other organ options for in and out, some good anthems to be sung during the signing of the register (though as usual rather randomly chosen) and some of the most popular wedding hymns from the inevitable Love Divine (and why not - it's a good hymn) to less common choices like Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. Perhaps the oddest choices are Elgar's rather weak Ave Verum Corpus (if you don't want Mozart, Byrd's is so much better), Walton's Set Me as a Seal and strangest of all Irish I Would be True. But it's still a very useful starter to explore some potential wedding music.
A newer alternative to Love Divine, the Classic FM 2 CD set The Wedding Collection includes a CD of traditional wedding music including Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’, Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’, Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ (though sometimes with a rather heavy-hand orchestral approach) and a CD of less traditional music used at modern weddings from Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect’, ‘Everything I Do’ by Bryan Adams and ‘This is Me’ from The Greatest Showman, but given the gooey classical treatment.
We quite often get asked where you can get sheet music for a particular hymn. Few hymns are available as separate sheet music. All the hymns and tunes we mention above are in both the main Anglican hymn books: Ancient & Modern and The New English Hymnal, except for the two worship songs, which are from Songs of Fellowship 1 (River Wash Over Me) and Songs of Fellowship 2 (I, the Lord of Sea and Sky). See our hymn book page for information on buying these from Amazon, but check with your organist first - many will already have access to copies.
If there is no organist available, you might find our hymn accompaniment CDs and downloads useful - they enable you to sing hymns without anyone to play.