Mordecai Seter

Mordecai Seter (; 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. 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. 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 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 eventua