For several hundred years, if you wanted to get married properly in Britain, there was a fairly obvious place to do it. You went to church. You arrived at one end of a building that was often several hundred years old, accompanied by an organ playing something reassuringly grand, made your promises somewhere near the other end, signed various documents and eventually emerged through the same door legally married while the organist deployed every available trumpet stop.
It was a system which had the considerable advantage of simplicity. The building was already there, the ceremony had already been invented, the clergyman knew what to say and the organist knew what to play. Nobody needed to decide whether the chairs should be rustic oak or limewashed cross-backs, there was no discussion about whether the ceremony should take place beside the lake, and eucalyptus had yet to achieve its extraordinary position as the official foliage of British matrimony.
Today, of course, the British wedding looks very different. Church weddings still happen and, when the church, music and occasion come together properly, I think they can be magnificent. But an enormous number of couples now marry in country houses, hotels, castles, barns, gardens and purpose-built wedding venues. We have reached the stage where almost any attractive rural building containing enough fairy lights, exposed beams and somewhere to serve a glass of Prosecco can become a wedding venue.
And with that change came another which is particularly interesting to me.
The organist came out of the organ loft.
He became a pianist. Or a guitarist. Or a harpist. Or a string quartet. Or a saxophonist. Or a singer.
In my own case, the journey has been particularly literal. I spent a large part of my earlier musical life sitting at church organs, accompanying choirs and playing for services and weddings. Today I spend much of my working life travelling around Britain with Anne-Marie as JAM Duo, taking piano and cello into precisely the sorts of venues which simply didn’t form part of the traditional British wedding landscape when I first started playing the organ.
In some ways my own musical journey has followed exactly the same path as the modern wedding: out through the church door and into the barn.
So how did we get here? And, perhaps more interestingly, has it actually made weddings better?
When Weddings Belonged to Churches
For much of British history, marriage and the Church were closely intertwined. That does not mean every marriage looked like the traditional white church wedding we imagine today. Marriage law, religious practice and social expectations have all evolved enormously over the centuries. But by the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the parish church wedding had become deeply embedded in British culture.
And with the church came music.
The church did not generally need to go looking for a wedding musician because it already had one. The organist was part of the furniture, sometimes almost literally. The instrument itself was permanently installed, occasionally at enormous expense, and the organist already understood the building, the service and, crucially, the peculiar business of making music fit around human beings doing unpredictable things.
The musical choices were comparatively narrow by modern standards. Wagner and Mendelssohn became enormously associated with weddings. There might be Bach, Handel, Purcell or other suitable classical repertoire, and there would probably be hymns. Ask some traditional organists of previous generations for a contemporary popular song and you might have received the sort of expression normally reserved for somebody proposing a barbecue in the sanctuary.
But there was something extremely important about the organist’s role which I think is sometimes overlooked.
The music was not merely decoration.
It had a job.
Music accompanied the arrival of guests. It announced the bride. It supported congregational singing. It filled the period around the signing of the register and, finally, it announced that the two people who had entered separately were leaving together as a married couple.
The organist was therefore part of the machinery of the ceremony itself.
I understood this instinctively from my own years playing church organs. You were not simply performing a series of pieces. You were watching what was happening and shaping the music around it. If the bridal party took longer than expected, you extended the music. If they moved faster, you found a musically convincing way of reaching the end. If the paperwork took longer, you kept playing. The service moved and you moved with it.
Oddly enough, that skill has turned out to be just as important playing a Nord piano in a barn in 2026 as it ever was sitting at a pipe organ.
The Wedding Begins to Leave the Church
Civil marriage in England and Wales is much older than the modern wedding venue. The Marriage Act 1836 established civil marriage in register offices, giving couples an important alternative to Anglican marriage. But for a very long time, the choice could seem fairly stark.
There was the church wedding, with its architecture, bells, stained glass, organ and centuries of ceremony.
And there was the register office.
Some register offices were perfectly pleasant. Others had a certain municipal atmosphere which made one feel that, having married, it might also be convenient to renew a parking permit before leaving.
The transformation came in the 1990s when changes in the law allowed civil marriages to take place at approved premises. From then on, couples could increasingly marry in hotels, stately homes, castles and other licensed venues.
This sounds like a relatively modest administrative change. In reality, it helped transform an entire industry.
Because once the wedding was no longer tied to either a religious building or a register office, almost everything became negotiable.
And Britain discovered the barn.
The Rise and Rise of the Wedding Barn
Britain has a great many old agricultural buildings. For centuries they had perfectly straightforward purposes involving hay, machinery, grain and animals. Then somebody cleared one out, restored the beams, installed some elegant lighting and discovered that people would pay a considerable sum of money to get married in it.
I am being slightly facetious because many of these venues are genuinely beautiful. We play regularly in converted barns which have wonderful architecture, old stone walls, enormous timber roofs and spectacular countryside around them. They can create an atmosphere which is simultaneously grand and relaxed, something which is actually quite difficult to achieve.
But their rise says something important about how weddings changed.
The church provided a ready-made wedding.
The barn provided a blank sheet of paper.
Suddenly couples could decide what the room looked like, where the ceremony happened, what was said, how the bridal party entered and, importantly for those of us who make our living from it, what the wedding sounded like.
And once you remove a wedding from the church, you immediately encounter a fairly obvious musical problem.
There is no organ.
From Organist to Pianist
This is where I find my own journey rather interesting.
My musical background is rooted very firmly in churches and organs. I learned an enormous amount about accompanying people, shaping music around ceremony and understanding how music works within a building from years spent playing the organ and working with choirs. There is also something about sitting at an organ console which teaches you to think structurally. You are controlling an instrument which can move from almost inaudible to enormous, often while simultaneously watching a conductor, a procession, a clergyman and occasionally an unpredictable congregation.
But as my professional life moved increasingly towards weddings, the piano became the more useful instrument.
You cannot put a pipe organ in the back of a car.
Well, technically you probably could put parts of one in a sufficiently large Land Rover, but the unloading time would be unacceptable.
The digital stage piano changed everything for musicians like me. Suddenly a high-quality keyboard instrument could travel. It could go into a country house, a hotel, a marquee or a barn. With suitable amplification and power, it could even go outside.
The instrument was no longer waiting for the wedding.
The instrument could go to the wedding.
That is a much bigger change than it initially sounds.
When Anne-Marie and I now arrive at a wedding venue as JAM Duo, we are effectively bringing the musical infrastructure with us. Piano, cello, amplification and everything else required to make live music happen in a place which may have been designed hundreds of years ago for an entirely different purpose.
Sometimes, rather pleasingly, we still find a good acoustic piano at a venue and I will use that. There is something satisfying about sitting down at an instrument which belongs naturally in the room. But more often the modern wedding musician brings everything required.
The old parish organist waited for the congregation.
The modern wedding musician has wheels.
And Then Everyone Else Arrived
Of course, the pianist was not alone. Once weddings moved outside the church, the old assumption that ceremonial music meant an organ disappeared almost completely.
Guitarists became popular because an acoustic guitar can produce an intimate, relaxed atmosphere particularly suited to smaller ceremonies. Harpists brought a completely different elegance. String quartets found themselves playing everything from Mozart to Queen. Singers could perform a song with a directness that an instrumental version could never quite reproduce. Saxophonists became particularly popular for drinks receptions and evening entertainment.
And the cello, which for centuries had largely belonged to orchestras, chamber ensembles and concert halls, found a rather wonderful new role in weddings.
For Anne-Marie and me, the combination of cello and piano works particularly well because it can retain something of the grandeur of traditional wedding music while also moving effortlessly into contemporary repertoire. We can play Bach and then Coldplay. Pachelbel can be followed by Taylor Swift. A piece of film music can sit alongside something written two hundred years earlier without anyone finding the transition remotely odd.
That would have been almost unimaginable in the traditional parish church wedding.
And I think this freedom is one of the very best things to happen to wedding music.
The Couple Suddenly Owns the Soundtrack
The most important change is not really the instrument. It is the philosophy.
Traditional wedding music was largely based on the question: “What music is suitable for a wedding?”
Modern wedding music asks: “What music is suitable for you?”
Those are very different questions.
Today couples choose music because it reminds them of when they met, because it was playing on a particular holiday, because they saw a film together, because a parent loved it, or simply because hearing it makes them happy.
I have played bridal entrances using music which, viewed purely from the perspective of traditional wedding repertoire, would seem completely improbable. And yet, arranged properly for piano and cello and played at the right moment, it can suddenly make complete sense.
This is where I think modern weddings have gained enormously from leaving the confines of traditional ceremony.
Music can tell us something about the people getting married.
And that surely ought to be the point.
But Then We Invented the Bluetooth Speaker
Unfortunately, every revolution has unintended consequences.
Once wedding music was liberated from the organ loft, somebody eventually realised that you didn’t actually need a musician at all.
You could have a recording.
Then CDs became easier to use.
Then came MP3 players.
Then phones.
Then streaming.
And finally we reached the glorious pinnacle of human technological achievement: somebody’s iPhone connected by Bluetooth to a speaker balanced on a windowsill.
I should make clear that I am not opposed to recorded music. There are occasions when the original recording is precisely what a couple wants, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But I do think something is lost when live ceremonial music is reduced entirely to pressing play.
A musician responds to a wedding.
A recording does not.
This is something I learned as an organist and still use at almost every ceremony I play today. No two bridal entrances are exactly the same. One bride walks quickly. Another walks slowly. There may be two bridesmaids or eight. Somebody stops. Somebody gets emotional. A flower girl decides she has completed enough walking for one day and simply sits down.
Live music follows what actually happens.
The ability to do this is centuries old. It belonged to the church organist and has passed directly to the modern wedding pianist, guitarist, harpist, quartet or whatever other musicians happen to be providing the ceremony music.
Spotify, for all its many qualities, has yet to develop the ability to notice that the bride has stopped halfway down the aisle to hug her grandmother.
Have We Lost the Sense of Occasion?
This is where my feelings become slightly more complicated.
I love the freedom of modern weddings. It has allowed me to build a professional life making music in some extraordinary places and playing an enormous range of repertoire. I certainly wouldn’t want to return to a world in which every bride was expected to enter to the same piece simply because that was what brides did.
But I do occasionally wonder whether, in moving away from churches, weddings have lost a little of their natural sense of occasion.
A fine church does not have to try to be impressive.
It simply is.
Walk into a medieval parish church or a great Victorian church and the architecture immediately changes your behaviour. Voices become quieter. Footsteps echo. There is a sense that the building existed before you arrived and will probably still be there long after you have gone.
Then there is the organ.
I spend most of my professional wedding life playing piano now, but I would never pretend that a portable instrument and amplification can replicate the experience of a large pipe organ in a resonant church. When a good organist opens up a fine instrument for the end of a wedding, the effect is physical. The building itself seems to make the sound.
A converted barn can be gorgeous.
But it cannot do that.
On the other hand, a church cannot offer everything either. It cannot always give a couple the freedom they want. There may be restrictions on repertoire, structure, readings and exactly how the ceremony unfolds.
So perhaps what we gained was individuality, and what we occasionally sacrificed was grandeur.
The Outdoor Wedding Takes Things One Stage Further
Naturally, having escaped the church and discovered the barn, the British wedding industry eventually decided that even walls and a roof were unnecessarily restrictive.
And so the ceremony went outside.
This has required musicians to acquire an entirely new set of professional skills, very few of which were covered during my organ lessons.
I now know considerably more about wind direction, direct sunlight, battery power and weather radar than I ever expected to learn as a pianist.
Outdoor weddings can be beautiful. Some of the most memorable ceremonies we have played have taken place in gardens or in the grounds of country houses with wonderful views behind the couple.
But instruments have opinions about the weather.
Pianos, even digital ones, do not particularly enjoy rain. Cellos are not enormous fans either. Music and wind have never got on. Strong sunlight can make screens difficult to see and excessive heat creates its own problems for musicians and instruments alike.
The parish organist never worried about any of this.
His instrument was attached to a building.
If it rained, he closed a window.
Progress has its disadvantages.
So, Has It Been a Good Thing?
On balance, yes.
I think moving beyond the assumption that a proper wedding had to take place in a church has been overwhelmingly positive. Couples now have extraordinary freedom to create a ceremony which genuinely reflects who they are, and musicians have benefited from that freedom too.
Wedding music has become vastly more interesting.
The organ has not been replaced by the piano, any more than the church has been replaced by the barn. We have simply acquired more possibilities.
There is still nothing quite like a church wedding with a great organ.
Equally, there is something wonderful about a beautiful barn filled with piano and cello, or a guitarist playing quietly while a bride walks through a garden, or a string quartet playing a piece that means something deeply personal to the couple.
I certainly don’t regard my own move from church organist to wedding pianist as abandoning one musical world for another.
If anything, I see it as a continuation.
Much of what I learned sitting at organ consoles still informs what I do at weddings today. Watch. Listen. Adapt. Understand the moment. Don’t merely play the notes; make the music belong to what is happening in front of you.
The venue changed.
The instrument changed.
The repertoire changed enormously.
The job, strangely, did not.
From the Organ Loft to the Barn
Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about the whole transformation.
Once, the wedding musician sat in an organ loft waiting for the couple to arrive.
Today Anne-Marie and I travel around Britain taking our instruments to the couple. One day we might be playing in a stately home, the next in a converted barn, then a hotel, a castle, a garden or, occasionally, back in a church where the whole story began.
Bach and Handel still come with us.
But now so do Coldplay, Taylor Swift, film scores and hundreds of other pieces which previous generations of wedding organists would never have imagined playing as a bride walked down the aisle.
And I think that is progress.
Not because the new wedding is better than the old church wedding, but because there is no longer one correct version of a wedding.
The church gave us tradition, grandeur and an extraordinary musical heritage.
The modern wedding venue gave us freedom, individuality and the ability to make the music genuinely personal.
The best modern weddings manage to borrow something from both: the sense that this is an important occasion, but also the sense that it belongs specifically to the two people getting married.
And wherever that happens — beneath a medieval stone arch, inside a timber-framed barn or outside beneath a tree — I still think there is something particularly powerful about having a real person making the music.
After all, we have spent centuries developing the art of wedding music.
It would be slightly disappointing if its final evolution turned out to be an usher staring at an iPhone and saying:
“Has anyone got the Bluetooth password?”