Choosing readings and music

How much of each

A typical service runs 25 to 35 minutes, and a crematorium slot is often exactly that with the next family waiting. Into it usually go:

• Music as people come in, playing while everyone is seated.
• One or two readings, or a hymn, somewhere in the middle.
• Music at the committal, the quietest and most important choice of the three.
• Music as people leave.

Two readings is plenty and one is perfectly normal. A short reading well read beats a long one got through.

Choosing a reading

Three things that actually help:

• Say it aloud before you choose it. Poems that read beautifully on a page can be unsayable in a room, and you will not find that out silently.
• Length: under a minute and a half. Two short readings hold a room better than one long one.
• Pick for the person, not for the occasion. If they never read a poem in their life, a poem may be the wrong choice, and a paragraph from a letter, a passage they underlined, or the club's own words may be righter than anything from an anthology.

Where people usually look: the well-known funeral poems, many of which are old enough to be out of copyright; scripture, if the family is religious, and the minister will have suggestions; something the person wrote themselves; and song lyrics, which read surprisingly flat aloud and are usually better played than spoken.

The test for whether a poem is out of copyright is not how old the poem is but how long ago the poet died: in the UK it runs for the author's lifetime and seventy years after. So a Victorian poem is almost always safe, and a much-loved poem from the 1930s may well not be, because its author may have lived into the 1960s. If you cannot establish when the author died, treat it as in copyright.

Who reads

Ask somebody a step further out than you would think. A grandchild, a neighbour, a colleague of thirty years: near enough to mean it, far enough to get through it. Give them the words printed large, on paper, several days beforehand, and tell them it is fine to stop.

If nobody wants to, the celebrant or minister reads it, which is usual and takes nothing away.

Choosing the music

The three moments are different jobs

• Coming in: something to fill an awkward silence while people find seats. It can be longer, and nobody minds if it fades.
• The committal: the moment itself. Choose something you can bear to hear again, because you will hear it again for years, in supermarkets and on the radio, and it will stop you where you stand.
• Going out: this one may be cheerful, and often should be. A great many families choose something that made them laugh, and it is the right instinct.

Practical things worth asking

• Give your funeral director exact titles, artists and versions, in writing. They pass the list to the crematorium, which is who actually plays it. "The Frank Sinatra one" produces the wrong recording surprisingly often.
• Live or recorded. An organist may not know a modern song, and a recording of a hymn nobody sings can be bleaker than no hymn at all.
• If you want people to sing, choose something they know without the words. Two or three verses is enough.
• Check the length of the committal piece against the slot. Ask the funeral director whether it will be faded or played out; both are fine, but knowing which prevents a surprise at the worst moment.

Writing it all down before you forget

Once you have chosen, put the running order somewhere everybody can see it: the person leading the service, the crematorium, the printer and the family all need the same list, and the commonest mistake is three slightly different versions of it.

If you are using one of our pages, what you set as the running order appears on the page for guests and builds the printed order of service from the same words, so there is only ever one version. Building the order of service explains it.