Mordecai Seter

Mordecai Seter was born in 1916 in Novorossiysk

Seter was born Marc Starominsky in Novorossiysk, Russia, in 1916. He began piano lessons in Russia at age 7. In 1926 he moved with his family to Mandate Palestine, where he attended the Herzliya Gymnasium and kept studying piano in Tel Aviv.

In 1932 he went to Paris to study composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. He also took some lessons with Igor Stravinsky. He broke with Boulanger over her devotion to neoclassicism and returned in 1937.

In 1938 he came across Abraham Zevi Idelsohn's collection of Jewish melodies, and Sephardic and Mizrahi tunes became central to his music. Between 1941 and 1944 he arranged 144 such tunes. His oratorio Midnight Vigil, written for the Inbal Dance Theatre, reached its final version in 1961, and he also wrote ballets for Martha Graham.

From 1946 he taught at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv until he retired in 1985. His students included Zvi Avni and Noam Sheriff's peers such as Aryeh Shapira and Nurit Hirsh. Around 1970 he withdrew from public life, refused commissions and wrote mostly chamber and piano works. He died in 1994.