Mordecai Seter

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Mordecai Seter

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

Early life

Seter was born Marc Starominsky in Novorossiysk, Russia, in 1916 and emigrated with his family to Mandate Palestine in 1926.[1]

Seter learned to play the

Ecole Normale de Musique with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger.[1] 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.[2]
There, he pursued a musical language founded on his own unique synthesis of the latter, and other, European influences with more local ones.

Style

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

Hebrew was a further attraction for Seter, especially since he was focused on choral music at the time.[3]

In some ways, Seter's usage and internalization of traditional material resembled that of

Midnight Vigil, commissioned by Sarah Levi-Tanai and the Inbal Dance Theatre, which reached its final of five versions in 1961. Here, Mizrahi tunes are prominent, but also fundamental to the work's sound and structure is a twelve-note synthetic scale of alternating minor and augmented seconds. This scale interacts seamlessly with the borrowed melodies and governs the cantata's harmonic language, ensuring its remarkable cohesion through the common features of its musical elements.[3]

After Midnight Vigil, Seter consistently used modes and scales of at least twelve notes, which subsumed the borrowed materials but retained their essence. At first, as in the ballet Judith (1962–63), commissioned by Martha Graham (as was the later Part Real, Part Dream [1964]), his modes took the form of twelve-tone rows and their treatment that of serial technique, though without transposition and with emphasis on certain pitches to create at times a sense of tonal center. Seter felt his methods then and later to be more like theme and variation than serialism.[3] By the 1970s, his style had developed further: the modes now unfold the aggregate diatonically over as many as two octaves (in as many as 25 pitches), leading in such cases to pitch-class repetition and contributing to Seter's cherished sense of pitch centricity. The modes' adjacent intervals are always seconds, whether minor, major, augmented, or doubly-augmented.

Seter's works from 1970 on, all for chamber combinations or piano, are intensely introspective, perhaps mirroring the contemporaneous feelings of the man who wrote them. As one scholar writes:

[A]round 1970, when he felt that the fame he had gained following the Israel Prize (1965) was more a burden than a joy, he gradually withdrew from social activity, including contacts with performers, to the point that he refused to write on commission, and kept composing upon inspiration only.[3]

Nevertheless, "his music possessed a spirituality that was sensed by critics and audiences alike."[3]

Teaching career

Beginning in 1946, Seter taught at the Music Teachers' College. From 1951 until his retirement in 1985, Seter was one of the most influential teachers at the Rubin Academy of Tel Aviv University (previously the Israel Conservatory). His students included composers Tzvi Avni, Arie Shapira, Nurit Hirsh and the conductor Gary Bertini.

Reception

Seter's oratorio Midnight Vigil was regarded as a seminal masterpiece of Israeli music since its premiere in 1963.[5] An earlier, radiophonic version was submitted by the Israel Broadcasting Authority to the 1962 Prix Italia international radio competition, and won the first prize in the “stereophonic musical work” category.[6] The final, concert version, premiered in 1963, was subsequently paired with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra's Millennium Festival program of 1 January 2000. His later music, however, was often considered as introverted, reserved, even hermetic, a view which, according to musicologists Uri Golomb and Ronit Seter, "downplayed the palpable sensuous and dramatic aspects of his music, denying an essential aspect of Seter’s works".[7]

Awards

Seter's many awards include the following:

  • In 1965, Seter was awarded the Israel Prize for music.[8]
  • In 1983, he won the ACUM Prize for lifetime achievements.

Selected works

  • Sabbath Cantata for solo, chorus, and string orchestra (1940)
  • Motets for chorus ATB (1939–40, rev. 1951)
  • Motteti for male chorus with optional wind octet (1940–51, rev. 1985)
  • Four Festive Songs for unaccompanied chorus (1943-9)
  • Sonata for two violins (1951-2)
  • Sinfonietta for orchestra (1953-7, rev. 1966-70)
  • Ricercar for string trio and string ensemble (1953-6)
  • Elegy for clarinet or viola with piano or string quartet (1954)
  • Chaconne and Scherzo for piano (1956)
  • Yemenite Diwan for orchestra or chamber orchestra (1957)
  • Valliant Woman, ballet (1957)
  • Midnight Vigil for solo, three choruses, and orchestra (1957–61)
  • The Legend of Judith, ballet (1962)
  • Part Real, Part Dream, ballet (1964)
  • Fantasia concertante for orchestra (1964; rev. of Part Real, Part Dream)
  • Jephtah's Daughter, ballet (1965)
  • Jerusalem for 8-part chorus with brass and strings (or unaccomp.) (1966)
  • Hagut [Meditation] for orchestra (1967)
  • Ma'agalim [Rounds] for string orchestra (1967-8)
  • Espressivo for string orchestra (1971)
  • Janus for piano (1971)
  • Piano Trio (1973)
  • Trio for clarinet, violoncello, and piano (1973)
  • String Quartet No. 1 (1975)
  • Quartetto sinfonico (String Quartet No. 2) (1976)
  • String Quartet No. 3 (1976)
  • String Quartet No. 4 (1977)
  • Monodrama for viola and piano (1977)
  • Mirvachim [Intervals] for piano (1977)
  • Capricci for piano (1977)
  • Sine Nomine for piano (1981)
  • Piano Sonata (1982)
  • Music for piano (1982)
  • Piano Cycle for piano (1982)
  • Dialogues for piano (1983)
  • Improvisation for piano (1983)
  • Triptyque for piano (1985)
  • Post Scriptum for string quartet (1986)
  • Presence for piano (1986)

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 14 (1972)
  2. ^ Ronit Seter, "Mordecai Seter," in Oxford Music Online, accessed 15 February 2016
  3. ^ a b c d e Ronit Seter, "Nationalism in Jewish-Israeli Art Music, 1940-2000," Ph.D. dissertation, 2004
  4. ^ Seter, Ronit (Summer 2014). "Israelism: Nationalism, Orientalism, and the Israeli Five". The Musical Quarteraly. 97 (2): 269–271 – via Oxford Academic.
  5. ^ Seter, Ronit (2014). "Israelism: Nationalism, Orientalism, and the Israeli Five". The Musical Quarterly. 97 (2): 276 – via Oxford Academic.
  6. ^ Golomb, Uri; Seter, Ronit (2019). "Mordecai Seter's Midnight Vigil (Tikkun Ḥatzot, 1961): Deconstructing Israelism, National and Biographical Myths". Journal of Musicological Research. 38 (3–4): 340 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  7. ^ Golomb, Uri; Seter, Ronit (2019). "Mordecai Seter's Midnight Vigil (Tikkun Ḥatzot, 1961): Deconstructing Israelism, National and Biographical Myths". Journal of Musicological Research. 38 (3–4): 333 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  8. ^ "Israel Prize recipients in 1965 (in Hebrew)". Israel Prize Official Site. Archived from the original on May 11, 2011. Retrieved June 6, 2011.

External links

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