Mark Fax
*Mark Oakland Fax, a child prodigy born in Baltimore, Maryland, was born on this date in 1911. He was a Black composer and a professor of music.
By age fourteen, Fax worked as a theater organist, playing scores for silent films in Baltimore's Regent Theater on Saturdays and gospel music at a Black church on Sundays. Fax enrolled at Syracuse University on the advice of his brother, Elton Fax, an artist who believed Syracuse faculty would take his aspirations as a classical composer seriously. He studied at Syracuse University, earning a B.Mus. in 1933, then at Eastman, earning a master's degree in composition.
While at Eastman, he studied with Howard Hanson. He completed his bachelor of music degree with honors and won the prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in a national competition to the All-University Honor Society. Depression-era conditions compelled him to turn down graduate fellowship offers, and he accepted a position at Paine College in Georgia, where he founded and chaired the music department. In 1942, Mark studied piano at Bennington College in Vermont. It was here that he wrote music for the Martha Graham Dance Troupe.
Career
In 1942, he returned to Central New York to study advanced composition at the Eastman School of Music. To support his family, he served as both choirmaster and janitor at a Rochester church until he won a second Rosenwald Fellowship. From 1947 to 1972, Fax taught music theory at Howard University and was director of the School of Music. Later, Fax became Acting Dean of Howard's College of Fine Arts.
Concurrently, he served as music director at Washington's famed Asbury Methodist Church, acting as the music director, organist, and composer. Fax composed works for chorus, symphony, chamber ensemble, voice, piano, and organ, in addition to two full-length operas, A Christmas Miracle (1958) and 'Til Victory Is Won (1967). Though many of Fax's compositions are unpublished, many had been preserved by his wife and reproduced in a dissertation by Velma Jones titled "The Life and Works of Mark Oakland Fax."
Washington Post critic Paul Hume praised Fax's Sonata for Clarinet and Piano as "striking…difficult…a work of surprising contrapuntal texture" and declared the composer's oeuvre "music of rare power," and 'Til Victory is Won' (1967), as excellent. Fax's epic operatic history of the African American experience was mounted at the Kennedy Center. Hume says of Fax's opera, "A strong and valid artistic pronouncement" upon the trials of the time it was written. Mark Fax died on January 2, 1974, in Washington, DC.
