Mark Fax

Mark Oakland Fax (15 June 1911 – 2 January 1974) was an American composer and a professor of music. Child prodigy Born on June 15, 1911, in Baltimore, Maryland, Fax was a child prodigy. By age fourteen, Fax was employed as a theater organist playing scores to silent films in Baltimore’s Regent Theater on Saturdays, and gospel music at an African American church on Sundays. then at Eastman earning a Master’s degree in composition. While at Eastman he studied with Howard Hanson. He completed his bachelor’s of music degree with honours; won the prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in a national competition; and was elected to the All-University Honour Society. Depression-era conditions compelled him to turn down graduate fellowship offers, and he accepted a position at Paine College in Georgia, Public attention In the Washington limelight, he finally received public attention. 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.” Til Victory is Won (1967), Fax’s epic operatic history of the African American experience, was mounted at the