In 1979, Wagemans' Muziek II was the first work of a Dutch composer to be selected since 1966 for the music festival in Donaueschingen. Wagemans plays an active role in the concert life of Rotterdam, concentrating his efforts in the field of contemporary music. Since 1990 he has been a programmer of various concert series of twentieth century music in this city's De Doelen Concert Hall and for the last ten years he has been an organizer of The Unanswered Question in De Unie Hall in Rotterdam, a project in which the work of young composers is programmed together with unusual forms of twentieth century music. Together with Otto Ketting, Wagemans was responsible for the gramophone recordings of the complete oeuvre of Matthijs Vermeulen. Art is a combination of recollection, association and quality.
Recollection is the ability to say something in such a way that it becomes a recognizable shape.
Association is the power to say something in such a way that it will be remembered, because it touches the roots of the soul. It is also in fact of the realm of recollection, but then of the instinctive, autobiographical part. Their emotional content, however, is denied by composers who only look at the structural side of music. To Wagemans, a dissonant is a dissonant, even in twentieth-century music. The music has a deeply dramatic character, so strong in fact that it could probably be reset as an act from an opera without too much trouble.