At my niece, Joan’s wedding, Sydney, my granddaughter danced the whole night then collapsed into a chair at 11 pm. My daughter, Beth, snapped this wonderful photo of Sydney dancing barefoot in her “swirly red dress.” I have decided to use this photo as the defining art for my music, well aware, that if this gets off the ground financially, Syd and Beth may be hitting me up for royalties on this picture.
As you are aware, I have started a “business page” at Facebook. It is under the name of Robert Charles Wagner @psalmofferings. Upon reading an article in the daily newsletter of ASCAP in early May, I decided to self-publish my music entitled “Psalm Offerings.” I am doing this self-publishing through a company called CD Baby, and am satisfied with the results. They distribute the music to Amazon, iTunes, Spotify and other streaming markets and collect the money. While it has never been about the money, if I make a little along the way, I won’t complain.
Since 1974, I have composed piano songs dedicated to or in memory of people as a present. In 2011 during a life and death battle with a MRSA infection, I decided to begin some autobiographical work. The first was a volume of poems dedicated to my beloved Ruth that recounted our courtship, our wedding, the birth of our children to the present day. The second occurred during a recovery from an injury during which I decided to transfer all the music I had written, songs, vocal scores for SATB choir, and piano music to a digital format.
Psalm Offerings are instrumental piano pieces, mostly 3 to 6 minutes long. They embrace all musical periods from Baroque to Modern. I like to think of them as musical prayer for someone. It is somewhat similar to the Catholic prayer practice of lighting a candle as a prayer intention for a person, the lit candle being a visible manifestation of the prayer. The Psalm Offering is an aural manifestation of a prayer said for someone.
I invite you to listen to some of the music I post to this blog. If you enjoy it, I encourage you to go to CDBaby, Amazon, of iTunes to buy and download to your favorite device. The nice thing about downloads is that you are able to download those songs you like in contrast to downloading a whole album. You can also contact me and I will send you a CD. The CD will be more expensive than a downloaded album (unless you burn them off a computer).
