Manuel María Ponce Cuéllar was a Mexican composer, educator, and scholar, born 8 December 1882 in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, and died 24 April 1948 in Mexico City. He studied in Bologna and Berlin before returning to teach at Mexico’s National Conservatory of Music, and became known as the ‘Creator of the Modern Mexican Song’ for popular art songs like Estrellita (1912). From the early 1920s he formed a close friendship and creative partnership with guitarist Andrés Segovia, for whom he wrote the bulk of his guitar output, including Variations and Fugue on ‘La Folía’, Sonatina meridional, and the guitar concerto Concierto del Sur (1941).

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Ponce is regarded as the founder of the modern Mexican art-music tradition, connecting the concert stage with Mexican folk song and popular idiom. His long collaboration with Segovia produced a core body of 20th-century guitar repertoire — solo works, a guitar-and-harpsichord sonata, and the Concierto del Sur — that helped establish the classical guitar as a legitimate concert and concerto instrument alongside the piano and violin.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Ponce_(composer)