Choosing Celebration of Life Music: A Music Therapist's Guide (Milwaukee)

When a family asks me to play for a celebration of life, there's usually a pause before the real question comes out.

What are we even supposed to play?

Most of us have planned a hundred playlists in our lives — workout mixes, road trip mixes, dinner party mixes. But a memorial service isn't a mix. It's one of the last things you'll ever do for someone, and that weight makes the music question feel enormous.

Here's the good news: choosing celebration of life music isn't about finding perfect songs. It's about finding honest ones.

Guitar has a way of making a room breathe — I bring it to memorials the way I bring it to hospice bedsides.

Start With What Meant Something to Them

The biggest mistake I see families make is defaulting to "peaceful" music — soft, generic, forgettable. It fades into the walls and says nothing about the person in the urn or the casket.

The most moving services I've played — and I've played a lot of them, in chapels, backyards, funeral homes, and venues all over Milwaukee and Lake Country — are the ones where the music sounded like the person.

So ask the questions that unlock the real playlist:

• What did they actually listen to? Not what they should have listened to. Dad's Sinatra records count. Mom's Eagles phase counts. The weird deep cut from their college years counts.

• What songs mark their story? The song playing when they met. The song from their wedding dance. The lullaby they sang to the kids.

• What would make the room smile? A celebration of life has room for laughter. I've watched a room of mourners light up when an unexpected, joyful song hit — because it was true.

Write the list without censoring it. You can edit later — but start from the truth.

Live piano follows the moment — a playlist can only repeat it.

Music Does Something Words Can't

I'm a board-certified music therapist, and my day job is hospice. That means I've sat at bedsides where words ran out — and watched music step in where words couldn't go.

Once, during my internship, I covered a visit for my supervisor on short notice. The patient — awake, alert, joyful that day — told me her favorite play she'd ever directed was The Velveteen Rabbit. Something about that stuck in my head, and I later realized I knew a piano piece by that exact name: George Winston's "Velveteen Rabbit."

Two days later she'd declined sharply. Her daughter gave me permission to try the piece at the bedside, on a small keyboard, over her labored breathing. So I did the thing we're trained to do — the iso-principle: I matched the music to her breathing first, then gradually slowed the tempo and softened everything. Within a couple of minutes her breathing eased. The gurgling stopped. Her daughter came to the bedside for a final goodbye.

She held on for days through every attempt by family and caregivers to give her "permission" to let go — and she let go when the music came. It was, in my own words from my journal that night, divine orchestration.

I tell you that story for one reason: music doesn't just decorate a hard moment. It can carry it. A celebration of life is the same — the right song does what a eulogy sometimes can't. It gives grief somewhere to go.

The Shape of the Music Across the Service

Here's the practical part — the part most guides skip. A celebration of life has an emotional arc, and the music should follow it:

• Gathering / prelude: This is where people arrive carrying their own heavy morning. Keep it warm and gentle — instrumental piano or guitar, nothing that demands attention. Music that says you're safe here.

• The reflective core: During readings, tributes, or a memory slideshow, this is where the personally meaningful songs belong. One song that meant something will do more here than five generic ones.

• A moment of lightness: If there's a story or memory that makes the room laugh — let the music reflect it. A joyful song in the middle of a memorial is not disrespectful. It's honest.

• The farewell: The recessional or closing song is the last musical memory people take home. Make it count. Many families choose the person's favorite song here — and there's something beautiful about people walking out humming it.

You don't need a live musician to think in arcs like this — but this is the part a live musician handles for you, in the moment, reading the room as it happens.

Why Live Beats a Playlist (Said Without Shame)

Look, I'm a pianist — of course I'm biased. But hear me out, because this comes from the hospice bedside, not the sales floor.

A playlist can't tell that the speaker just ran long and the room needs two more minutes. A playlist doesn't notice the widow in the front row who suddenly needs something warmer. A playlist ends, and then there's that awful silence while someone fumbles for the next thing.

Live piano or guitar adapts. I can stretch a song, soften a song, lift the energy, or let a moment breathe — in real time. I've done it at bedsides with a patient's breathing, and I've done it in chapels and tents across Wisconsin with a room full of grieving people. The music meets the moment instead of competing with it.

If live music fits your plans — whether that's piano, guitar, or both — I'd be honored to talk it through with you. You can see what a full celebration of life service looks like here.

A Few Practical Notes

• Hymns, secular songs, or both? Whatever reflects them. I've played "It Is Well With My Soul" at one service and Springsteen at the next. Both were perfect.

• Special requests are always welcome. If there's a song I don't know, I'll learn it — families tell me afterward it meant the world.

• Visitation or gathering music matters too. The hour before the service, when people are arriving and hugging and crying — gentle live music there sets the whole tone.

• Don't overthink the volume. The music should be present enough to hold the room, and quiet enough to let people think. That's a live musician's whole job.

One Last Thing

You don't have to get the music "right" — there's no grading rubric for grief. But a decade of sitting with people at the end of life has taught me this: the songs that meant something are the ones that keep doing the work long after the service ends. Families hum them on the drive home. Grandkids ask about them. They become part of the story.

Choose the honest songs. The true ones. They'll carry more than you think.

Till next time friends 🎶 Rory

Rory Bolton is a Milwaukee-based pianist, vocalist, and board-certified music therapist in hospice care, performing piano and guitar for celebration of life services across Milwaukee, Lake Country, and southeast Wisconsin.