Composer. Most of his works are solo piano pieces and art songs. Mompou's austere, otherworldly style stripped harmonic and rhythmic development down to their barest essentials, and he has been hailed as a forerunner of Minimalism. He once said, "My only desire is to write music in which nothing is missing and nothing is superfluous". Frederic Mompou i Dencausse was born in Barcelona, Spain, of French descent. He studied piano at his hometown's Conservatorio del Liceo and made his performing debut at age 15. On the recommendation of Enrique Granados he was admitted to the Paris Conservatory in 1911, where he switched to composition after hearing Faure, Debussy, and Ravel. The music and aesthetic of Erik Satie made a particularly deep impression on him. Mompou's unique style was already evident in his first published opus, a set of piano pieces called "Intimate Impressions" (1914). He lived in Paris from 1921 to 1941, became close friends with Francis Poulenc and other members of "Les Six", then returned to Barcelona permanently. A shy, introspective man and a painstaking artist, Mompou identified with no school and blithely ignored contemporary musical trends. It was not unusual for him to work on a single set of pieces over years and even decades, making them difficult to date and adding to their timeless quality. He rarely gave concerts, abhorred publicity, and for most of his life was content to be known only by a small but devoted following. This came to include influential performers such as guitarist Andres Segovia and pianist Alicia de Larrocha. To the latter he dedicated what he considered his masterpiece, the four-book piano series "Musica Callada" ("Silent Music", written between 1959 and 1967), which de Larrocha premiered in 1972. His other compositions include the piano suites "Scenes of Childhood" (1915 to 1918), "Suburbs" (1916 to 1917), "Songs and Dances" (1921 to 1979), "Dialogues" (1923), "Preludes" (1927 to 1960), "Variations on a Theme of Chopin" (1938 to 1957), and "Landscapes" (1942 to 1960); the song cycles "Four Melodies" (1925), "Nursery Rhymes" (1926 to 1943), and "Dream Combat" (1942 to 1950); and the "Compostela Suite" for solo guitar (1962), written for Segovia. His only large-scale work, the oratorio for chorus and orchestra "Los Improperios" ("The Ungrateful Ones", 1963), was dedicated to the memory of Poulenc. The rise of Minimalism in the 1970s brought appreciative new audiences to Mompou's music and his popularity has grown significantly since his death.