The music histories signaled by (and in) Mordecai Seter’s notebooks

Spanning more than 2700 pages, the notebooks Mordecai Seter had written between 1952 and 1993 feature to-do lists, teaching schedules, other errands involving musicians functionaries that performed, published or broadcast his music. The disclose dozens of stylistic self-analyses (whose growing volume in 1960s 1970s would signal a creative impasse) alongside numerous citations from books on Jewish mysticism, esotericism, symbolism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, modernism, art history, musicology repurposed as borrowed autobiographical snippets. Combined, these two facets shed new light aesthetic shifts well stipulations historiography music Israel. And unsung chapters Seter’s autobiography unfold, they also thicken biography bigger ecosystem, unconditioned by notions peripherality Otherness.