Movie Music Monday – Wedding Crashers

The stars aligned for today’s Movie Music Monday. With one movie, we can celebrate two birthdays. The movie is Wedding Crashers.

This 2005 movie is a romantic comedy that stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. Also in the cast are Bradley Cooper, Isla Fisher, Jayne Seymour, and birthday boy #1 – Christopher Walken.

The film follows two divorce mediators (Wilson and Vaughn) who crash weddings in an attempt to meet and seduce women. In a movie that features various wedding scenes, you are bound to get a lot of different music. At the reception, you will get dance music, while the ceremony and dinner music would be of a different genre.

This brings me to birthday boy #2 – Franz Joseph Haydn. He was an Austrian composer who was instrumental (pun intended) to the development of chamber music. Chamber music would be piano trios and string quartets. He was often called the “Father of the String Quartet.” His music was said to have a “feeling of bliss” to it.

American Pianist Charles Rosen said this about Haydn’s piano trios,

“Haydn’s ability to create an emotion that was completely his own and that no other composer could duplicate — a feeling of ecstasy that is completely unsensual, almost amiable. There is no recipe for producing this effect …”

In all my years DJing weddings, I had the opportunity to provide music for many wedding ceremonies. There are quite a few classical pieces that are ceremony “standards.” One of those is Franz Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in D Minor op. 42, which appears in Wedding Crashers.

Happy heavenly birthday to Mr. Haydn and Happy 82nd birthday to Christopher Walken!