Tibor Serly

Tibor Serly (; Losonc, Kingdom of Hungary, 25 November 1901 – London, 8 October 1978) was a Hungarian violist, violinist, and composer. Life Serly was the son of Lajos Serly, a pupil of Franz Liszt and a composer of songs and operettas in the last decades of the 19th century, who emigrated to America in 1905 with his family. Serly’s first musical studies were with his father. Spending much of his childhood in New York City, Serly played violin in various pit orchestras led by his father. In 1922, he returned to Hungary to attend the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied composition with Zoltán Kodály, violin with Jenő Hubay, and orchestration with Leó Weiner. For the most part, these efforts received praise, both by Bartók and by colleagues. After graduating in 1925 with high honors in performance and composition, Serly returned to America, where he played viola with the Cincinnati Orchestra (1926–1927), Philadelphia Orchestra (1928–1935), and the NBC Orchestra (1937–1938). During these years, Serly formed close relationships with the poets Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, who wrote a dedicatory poem to Serly, published in the avant-garde magazine Blues in Februa