Mordecai Seter

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Mordecai Seter

Mordecai Seter ( Hebrew מרדכי סטר, born as Marc Starominsky ; *  February 26, 1916 in Novorossiysk ; † August 8, 1994 in Tel Aviv ) was an Israeli composer. Along with composers such as Paul Ben-Haim , Ödön Pártos and Josef Tal, he belongs to the generation of founders of Israeli modernism, but pursued an individual path and therefore cannot be assigned to any compositional direction or school. As a university lecturer, he left a lasting mark on a large number of young Israeli artists and teachers due to his extensive knowledge and artistic ideals.

Live and act

Originally from Russia, Seter came to Eretz Israel / Palestine as early as 1926 and continued his pianistic training there at the age of ten, which he had started as a student in Novorossiysk. At the age of 16 he went to Paris and studied from 1932 to 1937 at the École Normale de Musique in Paris , where he soon decided to pursue a career as a composer. The core subjects at the École Normale included the study of Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. Accordingly, he first composed choral music that corresponded to this sound ideal. Joachim Stutschewsky , one of the first pioneers of Israeli music, however, drew Seter's interest to the Hebrew-Oriental melodies as collected and published by Abraham Zvi Idelsohn . "My ethnomusicological research on traditional Mizrahi [Jewish melodies of the Middle East] were reflected in a collection of 144 own transcriptions." In addition boosted the studies in Paris with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger and occasionally in Igor Stravinsky 's compositional imagination, and so Seter was soon looking for a cantability that was less influenced by Central Europe than by his new home, Palestine. Like other of his Israeli colleagues, he was now looking for a style that would reveal an Israeli identity. To this end, he first integrated “in his early compositions influences from the Jewish liturgy and Sephardic folklore with a westernized modernist attitude. [...] Later he developed a completely independent spelling “, in which he could express his emotions and thoughts. From 1946 he taught at Music Teachers College and from 1951 to 1985 at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv . “In 1962, Seter was awarded the Prix ​​d'Italia for the midnight watch radio station for his masterful mastery of massive sound forces . […] Seter's instrumental music bears the stamp of his experience with vocal music as well as Eastern monophonic and heterophonic. "

After his return to Tel Aviv, Seter became a teacher at the Music Teacher's College and in 1972 professor at the Rubin Academy of Tel Aviv University . Here composers such as Tzvi Avni , Arie Shapira, Nurit Hirsh and the conductor Gary Bertini were among his most prominent students. In terms of composition, he was now temporarily caught up in Béla Bartók's waters , which can be read in his Sonata for solo violin and his Ricercare for string quartet. His late work is characterized on the one hand by the twelve-tone technique and on the other hand by the strict work with the modes he developed himself. Each of these 33 modes “contains 12 to 25 diatonic notes. The modes create a strong coherence in his later work. ”During the last years of his life, after having only written for his own instrument, the piano, he did not write any more compositions on paper. It looks as if he recently failed because of his own high quality standards, which were aimed at permanent renewal of the tonal means. He saw one of his last compositions Presence (1986) as “testimony” [engl. Legacy]: A testimony to the possibility of a different existence. Existence in which silence is a meaningful sound . In other words: Seter had reached the limits of silence with his music and at the end of the 80s, albeit in a completely different way, had taken an artistic position that John Cage also represented. Yuval Shaked, one of the best experts on Seter's music, sees the quintessence of these late works in an abysmal sadness and desolation. In his opinion, the composer has finally given up the ongoing fight against the fading of previously played and heard notes.

Works (selection)

  • Sabbath , Cantata for solo, chorus and string orchestra (1940)
  • Four Festive Songs for choir a cappella (1946)
  • Sonata for solo violin (1953)
  • Elegy for viola (or clarinet) and piano (or string quartet or string ensemble / 1954)
  • Diptyque for woodwind quintet (1955)
  • Ricercar for violin, viola violoncello and string ensemble (1956)
  • A Valiant Woman - Ballet Music on Yemeni Themes (1957)
  • Tikun Hatsot [Midnight Watch ] oratorio for solos, choir and orchestra (1958–1961)
  • 1st string quartet (1958–1961)
  • Agadat Yehudit [The Judith Legend] Ballet Music (1962)
  • Jephtah's Daughter (1965)
  • Jerusalem for choir and orchestra (1966)
  • Epigrams for flute and violoncello (1970)
  • Capricci for piano (1972)
  • Trio for violin, violoncello and piano (1973)
  • 3rd string quartet (1976)
  • Sonata for piano (1982)
  • Piano Preludes To ... (1982)
  • Music for piano (1982)
  • Piano Cycle (1982)
  • Dialogues for piano (1983)
  • Improvisation for piano (1983)
  • Opposites unified for piano (1984)
  • Triptyque I - III for piano (1985)
  • Violin and Piano (1985)
  • Dialogue? ... for piano (1986)
  • Presence for piano (1986)

Honourings and prices

  • Engel Prize (1945 and 1954)
  • MILO Prize (1961)
  • Premio Italia (1962)
  • Israel Prize (Music) 1965
  • ACUM Prize for his life's work (1983)

literature

  • Ronit Seter: Article "Mordecai Seter" in Music in Past and Present , Person Part Vol. 15, Kassel / Basel 2006, Col. 635 ff.
  • Ronit Seter: "Mordecai Seter" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , Vol. 23, 2nd ed. 2001, pp. 169 ff., ISBN 0-333-60800-3
  • Darryl Lyman: Great Jews in Music . Jonathan David Publ. Inc., Middle Village, NY, 1986, p. 311, ISBN 0-8246-0315-X .
  • David Cummings (Ed.): International Who's Who in Music and Musicians' Directory . 14th edition. Cambridge 1994, ISBN 0-948875-71-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Ronit Seter:  Seter, Mordecai; Starominsky, Marc. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 15 (Schoof - Stranz). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1135-7 , Sp. 635ff. ( Online edition , subscription required for full access)
  2. ↑ Klaus Hinrich Stahmer: new toners and traditionalists - The Schoenberg era ; in: Reclams Kammermusikführer , 13th edition Ditzingen 2005, p. 920.
  3. ↑ Alexander L. Ringer: In the beginning - Composition in modern Israel, in: Music as History (Collected Essays), Laaber (Laaber Verlag) 1993, p. 246 f.
  4. ↑ Ora Rotem-Nelken: Booklet for CD “Mordecai Seter”; Piano Works 1983–86, Jerusalem 1995, Copyright Ora Rotem-Nelken
  5. ↑ Yuval Shaked: Congregate for a Dialogue - Contact - no Dialogue? in: Booklet CD Mordecai Seter Piano Works, Jerusalem (Israel Music Institute) 1983.
personal data
SURNAME Seter, Mordecai
ALTERNATIVE NAMES מרדכי סטר (Hebrew); Starominski, Mordechai; Starominsky, Marc
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Novorossiysk
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1994
Place of death Tel Aviv