Monday, August 9, 2010

Mexican Wedding Music

I've been asked to plan and play for a wedding at my church where I'm the music director. The unusual twist is that the bride wants Mexican music and a trumpet. We incorporate a broad array of styles in worship from German Baroque to Cuban a cappella at church, but sacred music for a wedding that leans toward mariachi is not something in our library. 

So I said I would research the matter and come with some suggestions when we meet next week.

We're also working with a singer. She got a head start and started searching online for some appropriate music (both text and style). But I'm told the search results for mexican wedding music are hard to interpret. Style isn't really the issue; the text is. As part of a worship service the text should not be completely secular--that would fit better at the reception. Translating the text to understand the meaning becomes necessary. Stylistically, a traditional musical style could be made to work.

I suggested she search for Mexican sacred wedding music. I've been searching a while now and that's where I started but not where I am now.

My series of queries has gone something like this:
mexican sacred wedding music
mexican trumpet wedding music
mexican trumpet music (at this point it occurred to me to widen the search)
latin trumpet music (this led me to collections of specific types of music)
bolero OR tango trumpet (aha, getting closer to titles and even free downloadable scores that could be useful)
I'm not done yet, but I think you can see how the query is refined by substituting first a more general term ("latin" for "mexican" because the results were sparse) and then more specific terms. While "tango" is not exactly a hypernym for "mexican music" it does land me in the neighborhood of music that may be used.

We're still working on the vocal music.  Any ideas?

1 comment:

Wedding Music Guru said...

Thanks for posting this fascinating article. It's really difficult to find information on the net regarding mexican wedding music, particularly relating to the various styles within the genre and translating the texts. I have a bride who has requested traditional mexican music for her ceremony in 2011 and I'm really stumped as to what our band should play. Thanks for the article, great work !