Manuel Blancafort has been played on NTS in shows including RVNG Intl. Presents Friends & Fiends, featured first on 27 April 2023. Songs played include Cants Intims.

Composer, born in La Garriga (Barcelona) in 1897 and died in Barcelona in 1987. He studied with his father, Joan Blancafort, and with J.Lamote de Grignon. He did not have a formal training as a pianist. As he explicitly recognized, the pianola roll factory Victoria, owned by his father, was his true academy where he learned a lot about music by perforating paper rolls of Debussy, Ravel or Stravinsky. Besides, his travels to Paris allowed him some intellectual contacts besides the purely commercial ones. His friendship with Mompou, who witnessed his early attempts at composition, was decisive to his decision to undertake composition clandestine activity due to his father's resistance, until his first works were published a few years later.

Blancafort was member of a group of Catalan composers that started publishing their first works just before the twenties trying to break with wagnerism and nationalism. As he wrote in 1929, "To get rid of Wagner is, in my opinion, the first commandment of the new Catalan music…A few of us in Catalonia would rather lean towards Paris than to Berlin". The group was formally organized in 1931 as the "Asociación de Compositores Independientes de Catalunya (CIC)" and counted Toldrà, Mompou, Samper and Gerhard as members.

His first works consist of small scale piano pieces, songs and choral pieces in a fresh style very close to that of Mompou and indebted to Satie, Debussy and les Six. Both aimed to maximum expressiveness through minimum means. El Parc d'Atraccions, premiered by Ricardo Viñes in Paris, was an immediate success and Blancafort's music was very fashionable in the happy twenties. Its humorous and ironic style contrasts with the more intimate atmosphere of Cants íntims, Notes d'antany or Camí de Siena.

His music evolves with a stronger emphasis on constructivism and orchestral works, paying more attention to structure along the lines of Ravel or Stravinsky. Of this later period are his large scale pieces like the two string quartets, the piano concertos, or the cantata Virgo Maria..