But it could happen.

It's hard to imagine your Big Day without "Here Comes the Bride," but if you're not having your wedding in a church, where exactly will the tunes come from?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the wonderful world of selecting a ceremony musician.

It's harder than it seems.

In my case, I'm choosing from a slew of instrument-toting strangers I've never heard of in a city I've only visited a handful of times.

And as you might expect, the cooler the setup, the more it costs.

When my wedding coordinator's preferred vendor asked me what I was looking for in a ceremony musician, she was met with a resounding "uhhhhhhh ..."

So she sent me some samples and told me to think about it.

Right now I have CDs of a harpist, a string quartet and a dude on a keyboard gathering dust on my entertainment center, and I'm still no farther along in making my selection.

The keyboard guy is by far the most affordable, but is that super cheesy? Would I be better off recruiting a kid from a nearby Kindergarten to play "Hot Cross Buns" on the recorder? Or maybe get a guy in a track suit to follow me down the aisle with a boombox on his shoulder?

I think so.

But what to do? And furthermore, what to play? My vendor says some people like to mix in contemporary songs -- Norah Jones comes to mind -- along with the old faves.

But I can't think of anything more awkward than having 100 people sit there, slowly aging, on the precipice of a narcoleptic fit, forcibly listening to some schmaltzy Michael Bolton number they've heard on the radio approximately 4382916538908119307590 times before and never liked that much in the first place.

What do you think? What constitutes good wedding music? Is it cool to mix the new and the old? Is the string quartet pretentious? Is the keyboard guy embarrassing?

Discuss.