Interest in Joseph Marx's music has increased considerably since the 1980s, due in part to growing demands from audiences to hear more tonal music from the early twentieth century. Marx was a younger contemporary of Arnold Schoenberg, but he was unwilling to adopt the elder composer's atonality or his twelve tone method, which came to dominate Viennese circles. Instead, like Erich Korngold and Alexander von Zemlinsky, Marx maintained the use of tonality in all his music, though his handling of it was quite advanced -- ...
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Interest in Joseph Marx's music has increased considerably since the 1980s, due in part to growing demands from audiences to hear more tonal music from the early twentieth century. Marx was a younger contemporary of Arnold Schoenberg, but he was unwilling to adopt the elder composer's atonality or his twelve tone method, which came to dominate Viennese circles. Instead, like Erich Korngold and Alexander von Zemlinsky, Marx maintained the use of tonality in all his music, though his handling of it was quite advanced -- thanks to the strong influence of Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy -- and his chamber works are surprisingly modern in their tone and in their rejection of Wagnerian expressions. The Quartetto in modo antico (1937-1938) hearkens back to the Renaissance for its contrapuntal techniques, but in terms of harmony and string sonorities, it seems more akin to the quartets by Debussy and Ravel, and also resembles the modal chamber music current at the time in England. The...
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