Beginning with my earliest compositions composed for piano, I am publishing the album notes I have written for each one of my CDs. These are the notes for Psalm Offerings Opus 1. You can find the music for sale at both Amazon and iTunes. You can also listen to the music at no cost on You Tube.
PSALM OFFERINGS
OPUS 1
Musical Prayer for the Pianoforte
By Robert Charles Wagner
© 2016, music and text, Robert Charles Wagner. All rights reserved.
All pictures from family photo albums or in the public domain.
Introduction
My father was a mechanical engineer, a brilliant mathematician, and a great man of faith. Whenever there was a lawsuit involving an accident between a train and a vehicle, my father was called to court as a professional witness. His testimony helped to decide whether the engineer of the train could have stopped the train in time to order to avoid hitting the vehicle. The math formula used for many years was only accurate plus or minus 100 yards. My father began work on a mathematical formula that would be more accurate in determining the stopping distance of a train given a number of variables. The formula he created and copyrighted was found to be accurate to plus or minus 5 feet, and from that time forward has been the formula used in courtrooms. I once asked my father whether he made any money on his formula. He said no and added that he intentionally planned it that way. The inspiration he had to create the formula did not belong to him, it belonged to God who inspired him. As such, the formula belonged to all of humankind and was free to be used by all humankind.
I mention this story about my father primarily because his premise is totally accurate about all good things that are created. It makes no difference whether it be a scientific breakthrough in medicine, the understanding of the universe, or creating a work of art. All inspired good that is created by the human mind is a gift that originated in God. The music of this opus, this creation of pitches, rhythm, harmony and tempo, I attribute to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
About the Psalm Offerings. I think of these songs as a musical prayer offered up for the person or persons to whom they are dedicated. It is somewhat familiar to the Catholic custom of lighting a candle as a visible manifestation of a prayer being offered to God. Biblical Psalmody are sacred songs. Like their Biblical counterparts, I consider these sacred songs, too, albeit without text. These have been written over a long period of time, beginning in 1970 and continuing to the present.
As the photograph suggests, music has been in my blood from the beginning. My Great Aunt Sarah Gallagher insisted that the musical DNA of my Great Grandpap Marron ran in my veins. My Great Grandpap Marron was an Irish Traditional Musician whose fiddle played many a jig, reel, and ballad for dances and other occasions. I would like to think that Great Aunt Sarah was spot on about this, or perhaps that I am channeling Great Grandpap Marron’s spirit in some fashion or another.
Long before I met the love and center of my life, my beloved Ruthie, music had been the love and stabilizing center of my life. It was not performance I was after as a young person, but the creation of new music. Leonard Bernstein, in one of his Young People’s Concerts, pointed out that there are only 12 pitches in the chromatic scale and over time the combinations of these were going to used and reused. Of course, Bernstein was correct and promptly demonstrated this using the musical tune, “How Dry I Am” in any number of folk and symphonic melodies. As much as we may think that what we compose is original, we quickly find it is just another variation on a common theme. Many an Irish folk song uses the same basic melody. The Irish believe that if a melody is a good one, why waste on only one song, use it as the basis of many other songs. With this in mind, you may in the course of listening to this music hear something vaguely familiar.
You will hear the influences of Classical Music composers. The polyphony of Johann Sebastian Bach, from the Baroque Period, to the sonorous homophony of Frederick Chopin, from the Romantic Period, to the ethereal sonorities of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, from the Impressionistic Period, the modern music of Paul Hindemith and the atonal serial music of Arnold Schoenberg.
These Psalm Offerings were composed from 1970 to 1974, many beginning as music assignments for Dr. James Callahan, my music professor in Music Theory Classes 1 and 2. I would take these bits and pieces of those assignments and expand them into more complete music compositions. This was a time of great musical exploration and experimentation. My major instrument was piano, and Dr. Callahan was introducing me to the music of J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Listz, Chopin, Mendelsohn, Bartok, Debussy, Ravel, Hindemith, Schoenberg. This was like learning to speak many different dialects of the language of music. All of them different, challenging, enticing, and exciting. At the same time, I was ushering at the Minnesota Symphony concerts held at O’Shaughnessy Hall on the campus of the College of St. Catherine and listening to the vast array of music they performed.
Robert Charles Wagner
January 2016
Psalm Offering 1: “Prelude” (composed for my Dad)
Psalm 1 Opus 1 was written in 1972 for my dad, Walter Walterman Wagner. Dad is the closest I have come to knowing a saint. A man of compassion, a man of service, a man of intelligence and a man of courage who lived his faith to the fullest. There is not enough room to begin to say all that could be said about this very great man. Though he loved music, he couldn’t play a lick, except perhaps for some of those gimmicky piano songs. This Psalm Offering is not the first composition I wrote. That was written when I was in 8th grade. However, it is pretty close to being the first full composition I wrote for piano. Dad had specific tastes when it came to music. He loved Classical Music, primarily that written during the Romantic Period. He had a special love for Tchaikovsky. I remember him after supper, sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe and listening to music on the phonograph. This was written as a birthday present for my Dad. It is written in simple three part, ABA form. I was heavily influenced by the music of Frederick Chopin at the time, hence, you will hear a heavy influence of the Romantic Period present in this song.
Psalm Offering 2: Lento con dolente (for the men and women who fought in the Vietnam War)
This Psalm Offering was written in 1971, when the Vietnam War, the war of my generation was still being fought. I was a Music Major in my Sophomore year at the College of St. Thomas at the time this was composed, and eligible for the draft. My draft status was 1-A. While I could have obtained a student deferment delaying my eligibility for the draft, I chose not to do so out of a feeling of solidarity with the men from my age group. As it ended up, Selective Service moved to a lottery system with random numbers assigned to dates of birth. The number for my birth date exceeded the number from which Selective Service drafted that year, moving my draft status from 1-A to 1-H (meaning if there was another World War III, I would be drafted).
I never served in the Vietnam War, but knew many and worked with many who did. For those who served in combat, their tour of duty “In Country” was for one year. However, that one year serving in Vietnam continued to haunt and possess their souls when they returned State side, many of them never recovering from the experiences of what they did, what they saw, and what happened to the people with whom they served and the people whom they fought. When I think of the Vietnam War and all the lives that were lost in that hopeless effort, I think of the words Pope John Paul II spoke in condemning the invasion of Iraq by the United States. The stern warning the Pope gave to our nation was, “War is ALWAYS a defeat for humanity!” No one wins, all who participate in war end up broken.
In the three years I ministered at St. Stephen’s in South Minneapolis, many of the homeless we served in the homeless shelter were former Vietnam War veterans, still broken psychologically from what they experienced in combat 40 years earlier. It is to all the men and women broken by that war that this Psalm Offering is dedicated. It is written in three part, ABA form. The slow mournful melody A, the motif for war, the dance like quality of melody B, the propagandized promise of glory to unsuspecting youth, and a return to melody A with ponderous, oppressive octaves, revealing the true horror of war. The Psalm Offering ends with a mournful tolling of bells for the war dead.
This Psalm Offering is dedicated to my mother, Regina, “Queenie”, Jernstrom Wagner. My mom has been and remains an incredible person. She has always found great strength in God which has sustained her through many of the tragedies in her life, the death of her mother, when mom was 12 years old, her little sister dying two weeks later on Christmas Day, her dad dying when mom was 25 years old, the death of my sister, Mary, in 1997, and my Dad’s death in 2004. My mom received a Degree in Home Economics from Mount Mercy College in Pittsburgh, PA. She taught in the public school system, and later for the Gas Company in Pennsylvania conducting cooking schools throughout the state.
She met my father, moved to Chicago, and raised her family. After leaving teaching to raise us, she continued to substitute teach in the Catholic Schools insisting that she receive no pay. She believed she had already been paid in full in having had the opportunity to receive a college education. Always one seeking to help others, she continues to do so even now that she is 94 years of age. I composed this Psalm Offering for her in 1972. The music is a variant of the Rondo form, ABCBAB. I always thought of the running arpeggio in the left hand as a kind of musical water fountain flowing up from the lower register of the piano, cresting, then flowing back down. Though the Psalm Offering is written in a major key area, it has a kind of wistful, sad quality to it.
Epilogue: My mother died peacefully on June 30, 2018 at the age of 97 years.
Psalm Offering 4: Impromptu (For the Victims of Violence)
Psalm Offering 4 is dedicated to all victims of violence. Throughout the 1960’s and early 1970’s the United States was awash in violence. It was the time of assassinations, John F Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, bloody violent protests both for the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War movements, the Kent State Massacre, riots everywhere.
We pride ourselves on being a Christian nation and yet, we inflict untold horror and violence on so many people. We forget what Jesus said in the last judgment scene in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 25, “when you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.” While Jesus was referring to clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting the imprisoned, welcoming the stranger,” conversely, when we injure our neighbor, kill our neighbor, who are all a part of the cosmic Body of Christ, we are also inflicting violence upon Jesus.
This Psalm Offering is not just for the victims of war, but for the victims of domestic violence, the victims of racial prejudice, the victims of poverty all of which inflict as much psychological violence upon people as physical violence.
This Psalm Offering was originally an assignment in the composition of atonal, serial music for my Music Theory 2 class in 1971. Serial music, while sounding rather arbitrary and dissonant (many considering the sound “ugly”) is actually more difficult to compose than the simple songs we normally hear. There are strict rules to follow in the composition of serial music. In editing this Psalm Offering in 2016, I have composed and inserted new passages, namely the ostinato sections, into the music to lend a little more interest. The form of the song is a simple three part, ABA, form. It begins establishing melody A, introducing and establishing the tone row of pitches, much like the introduction of the “subject” or short melody, in a Baroque Period Fugue.
This Psalm Offering is dedicated to my sister, Mary Ruth Wagner. I composed this in 1973, when I was a Junior at the College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN. Mary had just graduated from Our Lady of Peace, sadly, the last graduating class from that all girl Catholic High School. It was about this time in her life that Crohn’s disease, the illness which afflicted her from this time forward and would eventually end her life, began to affect her health in a major way.
At the time, internal medicine was just discovering what Crohn’s disease was, and Mary was treated for other illnesses before her doctors finally made the correct diagnosis. Mary would live another 24 years, go on to become an Occupational Therapist, graduating from the College of St. Catherine, and obtaining a Graduate Degree in Education from the University of St. Thomas. Between 1973 and her death in 1997, Mary had close to 30 surgeries, all Crohn’s Disease related. The doctors were finally unable to stop her internal bleeding and she passed away on August 10, 1997.
In her 42 years of life, Mary squeezed a lot of living, traveling to Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tahiti, Hawaii, San Diego, San Francisco and, even at her sickest, camped in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. She was fortunate that two of her classmates from Our Lady of Peace, became medical doctors, and they often accompanied her on her journeys abroad. At this writing, Mary has been dead for 18 1/2 years, and not a day passes without me thinking of her.
This is a minuet in G minor, in three part, ABA, form. While it has a vibrant tempo and the swirly feeling of three, there is a tinge of melancholy in the music. Little did I know at the time of composition, it would be a musical reflection of my sister’s life, that is, short, adventuresome, and filled with both a lot of pain and a lot of love.
Psalm Offering 6: Etude (For my beloved, Ruth)
Psalm Offering 6 was composed in 1970 as an assignment for Music Theory 1 in college. The assignment was to compose music in the form of an Etude, etudes being basically a music exercise for the hands. Some of the more famous Etudes were written by Frederick Chopin, most people having heard the #12 Etude, also known as the “Revolutionary” Etude. What I handed in to Dr. Callahan was the first 20 measures of this music. I remember I knew the intention of my Etude was arpeggio exercises for the right hand. I worked out the chord progression (harmonic rhythm for the musically astute) but could not think of a melody to go along with the arpeggios in the right hand. I went to bed and in the middle of the night, the melody came to me in a dream. I awakened and quickly wrote down the melody I heard in the dream. After it was graded I knew that I wanted to compose it as a present for Ruth.
I took my Etude assignment and expanded the original 20 measures and gave it to Ruth. From the time I was a Junior in high school, I was in love with this beautiful girl, Ruth Ahmann. Ruthie and I dated steadily since May of 1969. I had my whole life planned, and the biggest part of that plan was to marry Ruth. As you know, the biggest part of plan was realized and Ruthie and I were married in 1974.
I revisited this Psalm Offering in 1985, altering the middle section slightly. When Ruthie heard this Psalm Offering recently, she thought it was brand new. I guess a few years have gone by since she last heard it in 1970. One thing has not changed over the years. My life still revolves around that beautiful brunette haired girl with the most magnificent smile. The music is in three part, ABA, form.
Psalm Offering 7: Fugue (for Pope John XXIII)
This Psalm Offering was written in 1974 and dedicated to Pope John XXIII. I remember distinctly as a kid, the opening of the Second Vatican Council. While I experienced the transition from serving Mass in Latin to serving Mass in English, I didn’t fully appreciate the tremendous contribution Pope John XXIII made to the Church by convening the Council.
I picked the Baroque music form of the Fugue for this music because the fugue has a dynamic quality to it that truly characterizes the life of Pope John XIII. There is a relentless power in a fugue. The subject of the fugue, a short melody, gets introduced and repeated over and over in different key areas both major and minor, sometimes inverted (upside down), sometimes backward (called retrograde), sometimes slowed down (augmented) and sometimes sped up (diminished).
Just as the subject of a fugue dominates the music and continues through to the end of the Fugue, so the spirit of Pope John XXIII and the work began at the Second Vatican Council has not ended but continues to be implemented in spite of the efforts of some in the Church who would like to diminish it. It is with great hope and relief that Pope Francis I is continuing the vision of Pope John XXIII by implementing the reforms called by the Second Vatican Council.
Note that the principle pitches from the fugue subject I would take 12 years later and fashion a new melody dedicated to Archbishop Oscar Romero (Psalm Offering 6 Opus 2), an equally dynamic and inspiring man. The next time I would write a Fugue would be to celebrate the 12th anniversary of my marriage to Ruth (Psalm Offering 9 Opus 2).
Psalm Offering 8: Meditation in the manner of Hindemith (for myself)
Psalm Offering 8 was principally written for myself. It was not done as an act of narcissism. Rather, I had written all this other music for others, I wanted one specific song I could call my own.
As I was soaking up the musical influences from the Baroque Period to the Modern Period of music, one composer I truly admired was the 20th century German composer Paul Hindemith. He did not follow strictly the atonal school of composition that Schoenberg and others like Schoenberg had established. Rather he dipped into all the musical influences from the past and present to establish his own style.
Dissonance was as much at home in his music as consonance. His piano music from Ludus Tonalis, was a particular favorite of mine. It was in the style of Hindemith in which I wrote this Psalm Offering. I would compose more in this style, particularly Psalm Offering 1 Opus 2. Though I initially played this at home, as I developed more and more into a liturgical musician, I began to use this short little piece of music as a prelude or a post-communion meditation at Mass. It remains for me today, one of my favorite compositions for piano. It is in three part, ABA, form.
