Mordecai Seter

Mordecai Seter (Hebrew: מרדכי סתר‎‎, February 26, 1916 – August 8, 1994), was a Russian-born Israeli composer.

Seter was born Marc Starominsky in Novorossiysk, Russia, in 1916 and emigrated with his family to Mandate Palestine in 1926.

Seter learned to play the piano from the age of seven in Russia, and continued with his lessons and studies in Tel Aviv. In 1932, he went to Paris, France, where he studied composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. He also had some lessons with Stravinsky. With Boulanger, Seter mastered Renaissance polyphony and contemporary French style, but in 1937, frustrated by the extent of her devotion to Stravinskian neoclassicism, he returned to Palestine. There, he pursued a musical language founded on his own unique synthesis of the latter, and other, European influences with more local ones.

Upon his return to Palestine in 1937, Seter grew interested in developing a style inspired by Middle Eastern Jewish musical traditions. In Paris, he had been fascinated with cantus firmus-based techniques found in Western Medieval and Renaissance music, which derived from Catholic plainchant. Therefore, when, in 1938, he encountered the volumes of Abraham Zevi Idelsohn's Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies that contained traditional Sephardic and Mizrahi liturgical tunes, he consciously adopted them as a major influence, not only in and of themselves, but eventually as sources for the intervalic character of his own new modes. That this melos bore the local accent of spoken Hebrew was a further attraction for Seter, especially since he was focused on choral music at the time.

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