As a composer, Josef Schelb incorporated the most important styles that had developed around the turn of the century into his early compositions, most of which, however, were destroyed in an air raid on Karlsruhe in 1942.

After the war, Schelb turned to impressionism, expressionism, atonality and finally twelve-tone composition, but without ever committing himself exclusively to any of these styles.

As an autodidact, he combined them into a style all his own and followed his own rules of development, so to speak. Throughout his life, his speciality was the polyphonic treatment of motifs and themes, which he treated strictly or playfully, as main elements or in episodes.