He also completed his doctoral dissertation during this time, one part being the full score to a large composition (his "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra" [1978]), the other a theoretical paper ("Debussy and Octatonic Pitch Structure"). Armed with a Ph.D. from Brandeis, he took a professorship at the University of Richmond (VA), where in the fall of 1980 he organized an orchestral concert honoring American hostages in Iran. This concert attracted considerable media attention. In 1983 he joined the music faculty of the College of William & Mary, where he remained until 1992 as Director of Orchestras. During this time Suben taught a number of private conducting and composition students. While at W&M, Suben formed a chamber orchestra and created an annual series of the six Brandenburg Concerti of J.S. Bach in the historic Bruton Parish Chapel. He also inaugurated a contemporary music ensemble and an opera workshop at W&M and in November 1989 gave the world premiere of American composer Philip James’s cantata "To Cecilia" with the William & Mary Orchestra and Chorus. In 1992 Suben resigned from his position at William & Mary, returned to live permanently in New York, and formed Save The Music, inc. as a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. Apart from a three-year tenure as conductor of the Wellesley Philharmonic (the student orchestra at Wellesley College) during the mid-1990s, Suben has held no further permanent academic positions. Suben’s earliest serious compositions (e.g. "Sonata da Camera" [1966] for four violins), written while he was still in his teens, reflected a conservative aesthetic and an adherence to the trappings of tonality, prevalent characteristics of new works being composed then at the Eastman School. In his early and mid twenties, Suben’s work acquired a chromatic overlay that reflected the preoccupations of many of his peers and teachers with 12-tone procedures (e.g. "Birthday Fragment" [1972] for chorus and piano). His works from 1977 onward (following the three-year composing hiatus) are fully dodecaphonic (e.g. "Concert Piece for Clarinet and Wind-Band" [1977]). After 1978 his work began to show some influences of Witold Lutosławski and Witold Szalonek, the leading Polish composers of highly coloristic, voluptuous chromatic music of the time (e.g. "Träume auf Dichterhöhe" [1978] for horn and string orchestra), but notably no trace of any influence by his teacher Górecki.