Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (born December 6, 1933 in Czernica, Silesia, Poland. Died 12 November 2010 in Katowice, Poland) was a Polish composer of classical music. Though his earlier work in the late 1950s and 1960s were characterised by a dissonant modernism influenced by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and contemporaries Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki, he moved in the mid 1970's towards a 'pure' sacred minimalist sound encapsulated by the 1976 Symphony No.