Vic Nees

Victor (Vic) Nees (pronounced [neˑs]) (Mechelen, March 8, 1936 – Vilvoorde, March 14, 2013) was a Belgian (Flemish) composer (mainly of choral music), choral conductor, musicologist, and music educator.

Vic Nees's father was Staf Nees, a famous Belgian carillonist, composer and organist. His early musical education was intense but informal. He had piano and organ lessons, and after taking a preparatory course of solfège by Paul Gilson he became a member of the cathedral choir of St. Rumbold's, then conducted by Jules Van Nuffel, who greatly impressed him. Of equal importance in his education were his father’s musical friends and acquaintances; they included Marinus de Jong, Jef van Hoof and Arthur Meulemans.

But until 1956 he was mainly self-taught, using his father's library of scores and recordings. His interest in classical and romantic music was short-lived; very quickly it turned to the moderns of the day, like Milhaud, Hindemith, Bartók and especially Stravinsky; later also Britten.

As a young teenager he already substituted for his father, away on concert tours, at the organ of the Basilica of Our Lady of Hanswijk. His father also drafted him as an accompanist at rehearsals of a choir he conducted.

After one year of study at the Arts Faculty of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, he enrolled at the Antwerp Royal Flemish Conservatoire (now the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp) in 1956, intending to become a qualified music teacher. The degree did not yet exist, but in Antwerp Marcel Andries, whom he had met at home, was offering a pioneering program of music education that greatly interested him. At the Conservatoire he obtained degrees in solfège, harmony, counterpoint, fugue and music history. But when the Belgian state refused to recognize Andries's music education program with a formal degree, he quit. He kept in touch with Andries, however, whose influence on a generation of Flemish choral conductors played a major role in changing the practice of choral music in Flanders, substantially broadening its repertoire and turning it away from late romanticism, and having his choir members sing in a cleaner, leaner manner. Doubtless the best known and most influential of Andries's students was Vic Nees.

...
Wikipedia