What music was played at an Elizabethan wedding?

I am doing a project and I need to know what kind of music was played at an Elizabethan wedding. I am not able to use any information from Wikipedia.

What music was played at an Elizabethan wedding?
Your question pre-supposes that Elizabethan churches and weddings were like modern ones, which would be an incorrect starting point.





Firstly, churches at the time were very plain and without much furniture - certainly there was nothing for the congregation to sit on so everyone had to stand.





The wedding service would be conducted by a minister who was almost illiterate (he would have no knowledge of Latin for example) and the whole ceremony would be very sombre. No music would be played because in most cases there was nothing to play it on - very few churches had an organ at this time.





The festivities would take place before and after the ceremony - bride and groom might be accompanied to and from the church by a procession of family and friends, garlanded with flowers and dancing with musicians playing various instruments. The music would be traditional folk-songs, not church music.
Reply:I quote from Liza Picard's "Elizabeth's London":





"The party sometimes began before the happy couple even got to the church, and the drunken guests turned up half way through the sermon 'in all manner pomp and pride, and gorgeousness of raiment and jewels. They come with a great noise of harps, lutes, kits [miniature violins], basens [a kind of drum] and drums', and went back to their drinking and feasting as soon as the service was over. After a while the party moved to somewhere they could dance, and 'there is such a lifting up and discovering of the damsel's clothes and of other women's apparel that a man might [if he were a reformer, like the writer] think all these dancers ... were sworn to the devil's dance... ' After more dancing the happy but exhausted couple was escorted to the matrimonial bed with rude songs."





I think the music would have been popular songs of the time, and improvisations.





Someone may well correct me if I'm wrong, but I know that about 150 years or so previously, weddings were conducted at the lych gate of the church, not in the church itself. I'm not sure if this was still the custom in Elizabethan times.
Reply:They had a piano like instrument called the Virginals, and a guitar like instrument called the lute. However, marriage was a solemn occasion, and short of trumpeters, I know of no evidence that they had music in church, even choral music.