My wedding ceremony featured a harpist, Mary-Margaret Jones, who was out-of-this-world awesome. I know what you’re thinking, a Harp is super classy and fancy, so it must be prohibitively expensive, but let me tell you otherwise. In my search for ceremony/cocktail hour musicians, I found my harpist to be far and away the best bang for the buck. I got married in a hotel that had no in-house instruments like a piano or anything, so right from the get-go, I knew that I would need to either have my DJ play wedding music, have my guests use kazoos (both were not even close to what I wanted because I’m a brat), or get a musician who came with his own equipment to perform during the wedding.
I guess my wedding ceremony was more formal than not, so the instrumentalists that came to mind were pianists, string ensembles, and harpists. I played piano growing up and am a little snobby, so a pianist would need to come with a real piano and not a keyboard. I could not figure out the logistics of this, so I scratched that idea. Strings were the next thing I thought of only to realize that I would need to pay 4 people for the kind of sound I wanted. (Hello! I wanted a grand entrance.)
Finally, I looked into the harp which I should have done from the start. It was always in the back of my mind, but when I researched prices for string players, I just assumed it would be astronomically more for a harpist because, clearly, the harp is beautiful, expensive looking, awesome, and angels play them. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the harp was in my budget because, yes, you are paying for a cooler instrument, but you’re only paying for one person to play it. A harpist is less than half the cost of a string quartet and far cheaper than moving a grand piano. Look into it!
Ms. Jones warms up before the ceremony. Photo by Steve Su.
