Education
While earning a bachelor of music degree with honors, Fax won the prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in a national competition and was elected 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.
Career
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. Feeling that he was stagnating artistically, he returned to Central New York in 1942 to study advanced composition at the Eastman School of Music.
He taught at Black Mountain College in 1946.
From 1947 to 1972, Fax taught music theory at Howard University and served as 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. In the Washington limelight, he finally received public attention.
Mark Fax died January 2, 1974, in Washington, District of Columbia.
Views
Quotations:
“striking…difficult…a work of surprising contrapuntal texture”.