Archive for the ‘Wedding’ Category

Here’s the funny thing. I’ve been keeping an ear out for wedding music for as long as I’ve been listening to classical music, so the feat of selecting the right music wasn’t all that difficult. By the time we’d fixed a wedding date, I already had several musical pieces in the short list, though that list was to both grow as I thought of more possibilities, then shrink later as other considerations stepped in.

My list for Processional included:

• Main Title from The American President, by Marc Shaiman
• The First Kiss from The American President, by Marc Shaiman
• Prelude to Act II from Die Zauberflote, by Mozart
• Main Title from The Patriot, by John Williams
• Larghetto from Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, by Chopin
• Romance from Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, by Mozart
• Main Title (Excerpt) from Star Trek: First Contact by Jerry Goldsmith
• Ba’Ku Village from Star Trek: Insurrection by Jerry Goldsmith
• I’ll Always Go Back to that Church (Kip’s Lights) from The English Patient by Gabriel Yared

Let’s try a little litmus test first. How many of those pieces in that list is one familiar with? Maybe Kip’s Lights, but the rest of the music isn’t exactly mainstream music.

But I can almost see Ling fainting now. I mean, wasn’t The Patriot that crappy three hour American Independence War epic starring Mel Gibson? And music from Star Trek…??? Isn’t that like a sci-fiction movie for geeks?!

Well, be that as it may. But the music by the late Jerry Goldsmith for these two movies is no joke. They are among some of the most lyrical pieces every written, classical or film soundtrack. The excerpt from First Contact is in F Major, with a majestic and slow march-like melody to it. In contrast, Ba’Ku Village from Insurrection is a lovely piece in B Flat major which begins with the harp, followed by the oboe introducing the melody line, then joined by flute and finally the string ensemble.

• Main Title (Excerpt) from Star Trek: First Contact by Jerry Goldsmith (audio sample)
• Ba’Ku Village from Star Trek: Insurrection by Jerry Goldsmith (audio sample)

The pieces in the list above are also very roughly in two types, depending on the type of processional you want. If you’d like a steady march-like tempo but yet with an uplifting song for the bride’s entrance, the choices could be the gorgeous Main Title from The American President (very catchy melody in E Flat Major), the Excerpt from First Contact, or Mozart’s Prelude from Die Zauberflote, which uses a slower tempo with the central melody played by wind instruments in F major.

If I didn’t have any sort of constraints, my choice for a Processional would be (very easily) the Main Title from The American President. I’ve had for years wanted this piece somewhere in my wedding.

• Main Title from The American President, by Marc Shaiman (audio sample)
• Prelude to Act II from Die Zauberflote, by Mozart (audio sample)

On the other hand, if a gentle piece is more your idea of the Processional, there’s the very romantic First Kiss which begins in E major with a shy but lovely theme on the piano with strings to follow. Or the Larghetto from Chopin’s Piano Concerto, or Kip’s Lights from The English Patient.

• The First Kiss from The American President, by Marc Shaiman (audio sample)
• Larghetto from Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, by Chopin (audio sample)
• I’ll Always Go Back to that Church (Kip’s Lights) from The English Patient by Gabriel Yared (audio sample)

The short list above dramatically reduced in size after I started factoring in practical considerations. Among them included the length of aisle in the Wesley Sanctuary, how fast Ling was walking, how fast the flower girls and ring bearers would be walking, whether the music could be cued in and faded out at the right timings, whether I would be able to transcribe the music for Sean and Lok Sze, and whether/when the musical piece itself transposes e.g. into a minor key that would not had been appropriate for a processional.

Of that list, interestingly many failed on two counts: the problems of length, and minor key transposition.

So with these constraints, the choice initially was Kip’s Lights. This is a lovely piece that is heard when Hana and Kip are in the old church, and is performed by selected wind instruments and a string ensemble on melody and plucked. I’ve played the melody line for this piece occasionally at home and just before bible study at Ann’s place, and Ling’s been asking me if I could play for her the entire piece. It’s a simply, simply beautiful piece of music. The other choice was the stately Prelude to Die Zauberflote in F Major by Mozart.

As luck would have it, Ling was able to get Sean, her old disciple-group leader, and Lok Sze, an ex-student, to play during our wedding. She’s blogged about it 2 years ago here. As enchanting as Kip’s Lights is, I couldn’t for my life figure out how to transcribe that piece for piano and violin! So, for the Processional, the music was finally to be: Mozart’s Prelude.

• Prelude to Act II from Die Zauberflote, by Mozart (audio sample)

All things taken into account and postmortem 2 years after the fact, I think the Prelude was the better choice. Music in G major can be a little shrill, and the plucked strings in Kip’s Lights would make it sound as though Ling should be skipping on tip toes down the aisle haha.

The other pieces I chose were Praise My Soul, the Kingdom of Heaven for the opening hymn and the Campra: Rigaudon for the Recessional (audio sample), a piece that Ling jokingly thought was a mite too grand for our very modest wedding. As for the evening gown entrance at the banquet, I chose the Main Title from The Patriot (audio sample). Yea the crappy movie, but Ling absolutely adored the music so that was the vindication for my choice. The title opens with a violin and guitar with a slightly melancholic theme that at the same time sings of discovery:

• Main Title from The Patriot, by John Williams (audio sample)

So there you have it. Maybe I should seek casual employment as Event Music Suggestor. Or is there such a job LOL.:)

It’s funny that it’s taken nearly 2 years for me to finally get round to writing an entry about the music I chose for our wedding in 2006. Perhaps it’s that of late I’ve felt the urgent desire to write and recollect about so many things in life that I’ve been writing long and numerous entries here. So, for friends like Ann and Grace (maybe) who visit this blog to get their capsule versions about Singapore Current Affairs, er, I’ll get back to that… soon enough.:)

Now on the topic of Wedding Music itself, here are perennial favorites for this sort of thing. Like the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pachebel’s Canon in D for string ensemble or quartet, the Bridal Chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin, and Panis Angelicus by St. Thomas Aquinas and made wildly popular by Welsh singer Charlotte Church when she was still a wee bit of a teenager. There’s even a little cottage industry for wedding music albums, and any Google search will throw up hundreds of these albums for purchase.

One thing I resolved to do however was to go entirely off the beaten track. I looked through dozens, conservatively, of the Wedding albums, made notes on which ones had been used, and eliminated everyone of those off my list immediately. In other words, I wanted to use music that haven’t been used in Weddings before, or at least not in memory or media.

Tall resolution eh? Well, something helped. As Ling knows, I’ve started to gradually be forgetful. I used to miss just maybe 1 in 20 things. But these days, it’s whittling down to 1 in 15, maybe 10. But one thing I continue to retain is pretty good music memory. No, it’s not about hearing a music piece just once and unfailingly being able to recall it completely. Rather, it’s about remembering music textures, patterns, and (usually) melody lines.

Ling wanted a share of the action too, since she’s also musically trained. So she got to choose the closing hymn and also got alumni from the Hai Sing choir to sing a number during the church service at Wesley. But I got to choose everything else, and that specifically were the processional, the opening hymn, the recessional, and the second entrance music for the evening banquet.

To be continued in the next post! :)

Much of the two days of holiday at the start of new year was spent sorting out the pictures we took, and they’re now finally ready right here.

Oh yeah; now that the new semester of teaching has started for Ling too, it’s gonna be harder for her to do her cooking thing at home. And with both of us keeping long days I’m figuring we’d just end up eating out every evening at the same old places around Sengkang. About this food blog, how?! Maybe I should start blogging the canteen food at Temasek Polytechnic too.:)

Still, the possible slow-down of food entries is still a bit away; I’ve got two more entries lined up for the rest of this week. An entry on airline food - who would have guessed heh - and another for a brunch we had at Parkway Parade just before leaving for Korea a fortnight ago.

We arrived safely back in Singapore late last night after our 8 day Honeymoon in Korea.

We’ve skied, climbed up hills and mountains, tried our hand at making kimchi, grimaced at Korean Airline food, hit entertainment and theme parks, visited filming sites of Korean movie and TV serials, survived 18 degree celsius below freezing temperatures, and ate so much kimchi and barbequed pork that we’re thoroughly sick of it!Thankfully, both of us got back to Singapore with all our limbs intact and with most of our good health.

Ok, so Ling was a little sick at the beginning, and I got terrifically ill on the flight back home, no thanks to the germs getting spread around by the tour group. That was just a small matter though, as we had a great tour leader who knew the places inside out and made a lot of improvements to the itinerary, and very well-behaved tour group members who largely stuck to times, threw no tantrums, and generally were very helpful and jolly to each other.

We took about 910 pictures and around 70 minutes of video footage on MiniDV, so it’s going to take a while to sort them all out. When they’re done, the link to the photo album will be posted here.:)

The both of us will be heading off for our much-deserved Honeymoon tomorrow evening, and we decided on South Korea and Jeju Island. The blog entries on foodcourt dining in Singapore will continue; I’ve written enough of them to last for the 8 days we’ll be out of town. When we return just on the new year, we’ll be posting up pictures and accounts of our trip.:)

The pictures from our wedding on the 18th November were finally ready a few days ago, and Ling met up with Desmond Ho, our AD photographer, to pick them up. About 700 pictures were taken, with about 94% of them turning out pretty alright. Ling and myself will be taking the next several days to sort the 660+ pictures, select 300 of our favorite shots to be included in our 4R print coffee table album, and then re-printing selected shots for distribution to friends, guests, and helpers. Do bear with us in the mean time too while we do this. I imagine that the younger crowd, or heh those around our age, would want the soft-copies of the pictures, so Ling and myself will most likely distribute these via email.For the moment, a small selection of the pictures of the 660+ pictures can be found online on our album right here.

Both Ling and myself are pretty much still feeling amazed at how well our wedding ran on the actual day. We’d both heard quite a few horror stories of things gone wrong from others before. Even our officiating minister, Reverend Huang, shared some of those stories that turned Ling white.:)

In reality, everything turned out perfect. The schedule of events we’d taken months to work out had time redundancy so we arrived early at every one of the four major events and with plenty of time to spare too. Matt, our best man, took both bullets from Ling’s “sisters” when I arrived at Bedok to buy the bride. Danyel, Isaac and Gwen played their roles as ring bearer, page boy, and flower girl perfectly; Ling’s Hai Sing alumni choir sang beautifully, as was the music making from Sean and Lok Hze on piano and violin. There was plenty of food to go around for the lunch reception - too much in fact so a good portion went to waste - and I was glad to see many guests actually enjoy the food. I didn’t get drunk during the evening Banquet either!

Now that it’s all over, we just can’t be grateful enough to the many persons and helpers who made the occasion possible and had it run without a hitch. The many helpers in reception, ushering, and traffic controlling from ARPC, and especially Grace and her husband Roger, who both put into play the plans we’d spent months making on the actual day. I was thrilled that my parents saw how well Grace and Roger were running things, and asked that we expressed our gratitude to both on their behalf too.

We’re also really thankful to both Matt, who flew from halfway around the world to be our best man, and Doreen, who’s been Ling’s best friend for 18 years now, and was our bridesmaid. We closed off the wedding celebrations with a second thankful dinner last night, and hopefully, Matt will be writing an entry on the event soon enough.:)

The weekend has been terrifically busy for the both of us: on the day before when we were rushing about making final arrangements, the actual day, and the day after when we were going through the post mortem. The pictures for the events on the wedding day will take a while to arrive. While waiting for the other pictures that friends and relatives may have taken, I managed to snap a few of Ling during our rest periods at our bridal suite. They are right here on this link.:)

We just had our wedding rehearsal at Wesley yesterday, and it was quite a ball. We were blessed to have a good turnout for the event, and every person who had a role to play could make it.

It was just delightful to see how contrasting did each of the three children take their roles. Isaac, our page boy, Issac, was clearly having the most fun. Instead of holding his bible with two hands and walking solemnly, he skipped and jaunted down the aisle waving the book with outstretch hands.

Gwen, the two boys’ cousin, got her part right on the first try. She’d be carrying a basket and dropping little petals along the way, and Ling said she looked absolutely lovely doing so. As for Danyel, as the ring bearer he looked dead-serious, especially after when Reverend Huang told him he had do his part properly to “Uphold the good name of Anglo-Chinese School.”:)

The vows were hard to get right though: they’re a mouthful, and comprising of many short phrases. I couldn’t get mind absolutely right on the first rehearsal run as Ling was making me laugh too much. Ling fared much better though, and got hers mostly right on both tries. The both of us were really blessed too on how ‘right’ our chosen processional, special item by the Hai Sing alumni choir, recessional music was for the event. Hearing Lok Sze and Sean perform the opening prelude and seeing Ling walk down the aisle certainly moved me nearly to tears.

So, all in all, it seems most things are coming along quite nicely, though as Reverend Huang remarked, anything goes on the actual day. We’re keeping our fingers crossed for sure.:)

Life feels surreal now that the big day is only 4 days from now. Friends and relatives are congratulating us and the other question that pops up besides the standard wedding preparation question is “Are you excited?”

As for myself, I’m more worn out psychologically and physically than anything else. A brief moment of excitement did come at the beginning of this week but the final preparations weighed me down again. Despite of the maddness, I felt soothed whenever I listened to music and especially that beautiful piano-violin duet piece which Sean (my DG leader) and Lok Sze (my previous choir student pianist) will play for the bridal procession at the church wedding ceremony.

Another song which I have been listening in is ‘From This Moment On’ by Shania Twain. My choir alumni will be singing that piece as a special item at the church. The lyrics are quite lovely and the music definitely stirring.

Thank God for eveything made beautiful. Praise Him in good times and tough times.