OK, let's see if we can get through this one without a flame. Let me lay down a guideline: your answer should consist solely of the names of a composer and the piece of music. Only comment: do you need to have much classical training to do it?
Is that possible on this website?
Here is the question: What songs should a cantor know for weddings or funerals if he or she wants to get hired? Ave Maria, by either Bach/Gounod or Schubert, is the universal answer, looking at various wedding suggestions in parishes around the country. There have to be others. What, in your experience, should you be able to say "yes" to when someone calls?
I can't hit thank on iPhone apparently, but useful and many thanks. Looking at parish recommendations that come up, I was surprised that the lists are usually shorter than the one I got for my father's own funeral. Having something to offer would be nice. As a Protestant convert, I can see that hymns like Great is Thy Faithfulness would be popular. This isn intended as a list to make a point. It's a list to get hired.
The Call ("Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life") - Ralph Vaughan-Williams ... from his Five Mystical Songs (but NOT the bowdlerized hymnal version, which no cantor should ever sing).
Yes, I found that video--the Call. It is quite nice--and in unsolicited market testing, a friend who runs a ministry for one of the orders bringing Catholics back to the Church had a male soloist do this as a prelude to her own wedding.
I picked up some golden music here. The answer is, as someone wrote in a similar post a very long time ago: buy some compilations. Hal Leonard (publisher) seems to have a corner on the market, and I bought three dogeared ones for $19 from Amazon. As that involves $4 shipping for each book, the books themselves combined ran to $7. If they are used in a suitably professional way, it will just make me look all that more prepared. That said, I memorized half of Panis Angelicus at the end of practice yesterday, and will finish it off today so I can, as Johnny Cash said about his own music, sing it 100 times until it sounds like it's mine.
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