When Becky Pedroza began planning her wedding, she imagined a celebration as vibrant and free-spirited as her relationship with Erik Revelli.
At their wedding in May 2023 at Rimrock Ranch in Pioneertown, Calif., the Atlanta couple bypassed the usual wedding routines: no mother-son dance, no bouquet toss and absolutely no “Here Comes the Bride,” a song also known as “Bridal Chorus” by Richard Wagner.
Instead, Ms. Pedroza walked down the aisle, flanked by her parents, to “She’s a Rainbow” by the Rolling Stones.
“We wanted something that felt more like us,” said Ms. Pedroza, a 33-year-old graphic designer. She added that she wanted a song that made her “incredibly happy,” not one that honored tradition.
Ms. Pedroza isn’t the only one ditching traditional processional music. An online search for “Bridal Processional Songs” will return everything from Neil Young to Billie Eilish before Wagner even gets a mention. And the composer doesn’t even make an appearance on a list of “114 wedding processional songs you should definitely use” by the wedding website the Knot.
And despite its title, “Here Comes the Bride” was not intended to accompany a bride’s grand entrance, said Craig Kier, a professor of voice and opera at the University of Maryland.
Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” Mr. Kier said, appears in Act III of Wagner’s 1850 opera “Lohengrin.” It celebrates the marriage of Lohengrin and Elsa — not as the bridal processional, but to represent the pair’s passage into the future.
He added that the piece “found unexpected popularity in royal weddings shortly after its debut, sometimes paired with Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March.’”
Peter Kupfer, the chair of the musicology department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said the two songs were paired in 1858 at the wedding of Princess Royal, Victoria, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, and Prince Frederick of Prussia.
Mr. Kier, the University of Maryland professor, said the tune later became generally associated with weddings and eventually made its way into American ceremonies in the early 20th century — cementing its status as a wedding staple.
Mr. Kier, who also plays piano at weddings, said the song’s popularity declined in the 1990s.
Dr. Kupfer agreed with Mr. Kier’s timeline, and said that as “outdoor and secular venues” became more popular in the 1990s, so did secular music. (Churches, he added, typically require classical or religious music.) Data from Spotify supports the rise of popular music at weddings: Of the over 26 million wedding-themed playlists their users have created, more than 75 percent of the most recurring songs were released in the last 30 years.
This shift away from Wagner’s song is welcome to couples like Devon Gordon, 29, and her wife, Rosaria Gordon, 26, who live in East Windsor, N.J. When they married in October in West Orange, N.J., they “weren’t going to play ‘Here Comes the Bride’ twice,” Ms. Gordon joked. “So we chose something that really embodied us as a couple instead.”
They opted to walk down the aisle together to “Linger” by the Cranberries.
Mr. Kier said that “just as ‘Here Comes the Bride’ replaced older, more formal processional pieces in the 1800s, today’s couples are shifting to songs that tell their unique stories, marking a new era.”
For Margaret Meehan, 41, and Tim Monaghan, 40, this new era looked like a celebration of their lives. They married in July at Hotel Delmano in Brooklyn, where they also live, and their celebration was designed to reflect their connection to New York and to each other.
Mr. Monaghan’s band, Golem, a klezmer rock group, was part of the celebration throughout the day. One of the lead singers, Aaron Diskin, officiated the ceremony.
Mr. Monaghan, who is also a public-school teacher, arranged Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” for upright bass and violin for Ms. Meehan’s entrance.
Ms. Meehan, a writer, said the piece was performed by friends. But the significance extended beyond that. The melody also reminded the couple of a trip to Paris where they had visited a shop selling music boxes that played the same tune. The choice, she said, “was a no-brainer.”
Their ceremony took place outside the hotel, with flower petals dotting the pavement beneath guests’ feet. The sounds of the city — horns, the chatter of passers-by — blended with Golem’s music, creating a soundtrack that, as Ms. Meehan said, was “entirely their own.” And that was exactly the point.
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