Born in Barcelona to the lawyer Frederic Mompou and Josefina Dencausse, who was of French origin, Federico Mompou heard Gabriel Fauré perform in Barcelona when he was nine years old. His music and performing style made a powerful and lasting impression on the young Catalan pianst, eventually leading him to study at the Paris Conservatory, where Fauré was the Director. In his own music Mompou was primarily a miniaturist, writing short, relatively improvisatory music, once memorably described as "the music of evaporation" by the pianist Stephen Hough, who cites, as among Mompou's influences, Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin (as well as "plainsong, folk music, and jazz"), adding, "but his principal and fundamental stylistic ancestor...was the eccentric, iconoclastic Erik Satie." Imitations of chiming bells (his mother's family owned the Dencausse bell foundry and his grandfather was a bell maker) pervade his music, lending to it a kind of incantatory, meditative sound, the most complete expression of which can be found in the work we will hear this aftgernoon—his masterpiece, Música Callada (or Music of Silence), published in four books between 1959 and 1967, its title derived from the mystical poetry of Saint John of the Cross.
You can hear Foley Schuler's musical selections—and stories behind the music—every weekday afternoon on Blue Lake Public Radio.
