Manuel Ponce

Manuel María Ponce Cuéllar (1882–1948) was a Mexican composer active in the 20th century. Born in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Manuel Maria Ponce moved with his family to the city of Aguascalientes only a few weeks after his birth and lived there until he was 15 years old. He was famous for being a musical prodigy and in 1901, he entered the National Conservatory of Music, already with a certain prestige as a pianist and composer. There he remained until 1903, the year in which he returned to the city of Aguascalientes. This was only the beginning of his travels. In 1904, he traveled to Italy for advanced musical studies at the Conservatorio Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna. He studied in Germany as a pupil of Martin Krause at the Stern conservatory in Berlin between 1906 and 1908. After his years abroad, Ponce returned to Mexico to teach piano and music history at the National Conservatory of Music from 1909 to 1915 and from 1917 to 1922. He spent the intervening years of 1915 to 1917 in Havana, Cuba. With valuable activity promoting music of the country and writing melodías like Estrellita, A la orilla de un palmar, Alevántate, La Pajarera, Marchita el Alma and Una Multitud Más, Ponce gained the honorific title Creator of the Modern Mexican Song. He was also the first Mexican composer to project popular music onto the world stage: Estrellita, his most famous work, has been part of the repertoire of the main orchestras of the world and countless singers, although quite often the interpreter ignores the origin of the song as well as its author. In 1947, he received the National Science and Arts Prize.