Biography

Few composers today can claim a creative voice and artistic identity as distinctive and immediately recognizable as that of Bernat Vivancos.

Born in Barcelona in 1973, his musical personality was profoundly shaped during his years as a chorister at the thousand-year-old Monastery of Montserrat, where his teacher and spiritual father, Ireneu Segarra, left an indelible mark that would accompany him throughout his life.

Born into a family with a rich musical tradition, he is the nephew of the renowned jazz trumpeter Josep Maria Farràs and the son of Josep Maria Vivancos, who served as organist in several Barcelona parishes for fifty-four years. Following his time at Montserrat, he devoted himself to the study of the piano. Together with his brother Jordi, also a musician and sociologist, he studied intensively with the renowned pedagogue Maria Canals, developing a significant concert career as a pianist and graduating with Highest Honours. At the same time, he studied violin for six years with the distinguished Latvian teacher Eva Graubin.

It was during this period that he began studying composition with the composer David Padrós, with whom he trained for eight years and whose artistic value he has always championed. Deeply captivated by the craft of composition, he took a decisive step forward and, setting aside his pianistic activity, moved to Paris for five years to study composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse. There he worked with Guy Reibel and Frédéric Durieux (composition), Marc-André Dalbavie (orchestration), and Alain Louvier (analysis).

The year 2000 marked a turning point in his artistic development. Upon discovering the music of the Norwegian composer Lasse Thoresen, he moved to Oslo to further his studies in composition, an experience that would profoundly shape both his musical outlook and his future work. From that moment on, Vivancos’s style incorporated elements that would make his music unique: a richly coloured and highly textured sound world in which the modal traditions of Western music converge with a search for spirituality grounded in spectrally inspired harmonic thinking.

These two essential dimensions reflect the profound influence of nature on Vivancos’s work: nature as root, as earth, as a symbol of tradition, but also as a presence manifested through the physical properties of sound itself. Nature becomes a means of experiencing a spirituality rooted in gratitude.

Upon returning to Barcelona, he was appointed Professor of Composition and Orchestration at the ESMUC – Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, where, over the past twenty-five years, he has taught more than one hundred students who now contribute actively to the contemporary musical landscape in Catalonia.

Between 2007 and 2014, he returned to his origins when he was appointed Director of the Escolania de Montserrat. During this period, he led concert tours throughout the world while expanding his catalogue with a substantial body of sacred music written in service of the Catalan sanctuary, in the finest tradition of the maître de chapelle.

Bernat Vivancos was Composer-in-Residence at the Palau de la Música Catalana (2014–2015), where he developed a friendship with Arvo Pärt, and later served as Guest Composer at L’Auditori de Barcelona (2021–2022).

Throughout a career spanning more than thirty years, he has created a vast body of work comprising over three hundred compositions, with particular emphasis on vocal and choral music, while also cultivating an extensive output of symphonic and chamber music. His work U (OBC, 2021) marks a step towards a more experimental musical language, rich in microtonal textures, where attentive listening and devotion to sound itself become central elements of the compositional process.

In 2011 he began what would become a fruitful collaboration with one of the world’s leading choirs, the Latvian Radio Choir. Under the direction of Sigvards Kļava and released by Neu Records, Blanc received two major critics’ awards and was named Recording of the Year in 2011. This was followed in 2016 by Requiem, performed by the same ensemble.

In these works, Vivancos’s music—with its luminous sonorities, ecstatic harmonies, ascending architectures, and bursts of Nordic light—seeks to unite faith, sensuality, and beauty. This artistic partnership culminated in 2025 with the release of Tenebrae, one of the composer’s landmark works, acclaimed by critics following its premiere at the Peralada Festival.

His artistic curiosity has also led him into the world of cinema, contributing to projects such as Somni (Celler de Can Roca, 2013), Tros (Pau Calpe, 2022), Laguna (Šarūnas Bartas, 2025), and, more recently, productions developed with the American company Imperative Entertainment.

In 2019 he made a remarkable entry into the world of popular music through an iconic collaboration with the singer Rosalía, whose work achieved fifty million streams in record time. This was followed by collaborations with internationally renowned artists including Jennifer Lopez (My Party Tour), The Ghost, and, more recently, the singer Emika (Fountain).

Even in these projects, Vivancos remains faithful to his own musical language, creating a unique dialogue between two worlds that might at first appear to be opposites.

Faithful to his roots and committed to making musical spirituality accessible to all, he launched the digital platform Ora et Honora in 2025 (www.oraethonora.cat), a collection of chants, psalms, and intimate liturgical songs designed to offer the public sincere and authentic music for prayer and contemplation.

Having passed the age of fifty, Bernat Vivancos is one of the most sought-after and frequently performed composers on the international scene. His music has been performed on all four continents by some of the most prestigious choirs and ensembles in Europe and the United States.

Bernat Vivancos has been married to the psychologist Susanna Garcia since 2007 and is the proud father of his two greatest symphonies: Arnau (2009) and Oriol (2010).

A new musical Rennaissance. Text by Jordi Savall

It is certainly unusual, or unexpected, that a musician specialised in the historical, pre-1800 repertoire should write about the creative work of a young composer of our own time. I discovered the music of Bernat Vivancos, firstly, thanks to the magnificent double CD “Blanc” with choral works performed by the Latvian Radio Choir, (given to me last year by my friend Lluís Vilamajó); and a few months ago, on 6th March to be exact, I was lucky enough to meet Vivancos personally and to hear some of his remarkable pieces on the occasion of the memorable concert in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona; a concert in homage to my friend, the much admired composer Arvo Pärt (who this year celebrated his eightieth birthday). (…)

Fortunately, thanks to the complex, historical process of discoveries and creation, of recovery and, finally, also, of recognition of the atemporal value of every work of art, we see that, today, a better knowledge of our thousand-year- old musical heritage can act as an element of inspiration and revitalisation in the creative practice of contemporary music; new composers of our own day are being widely incorporated into this veritable, new musical Renaissance that we are experiencing in the twenty-first century.

Album Paraphrase and miracles. Text by Jaume Cabré

I think of these eight works as a long meditation on musical and literary themes that are part of the life of the monastery, from the perspective of a musician who has lived, worked and, probably, composed there.

These eight works are a kind of paraphrasing of liturgical, or simply religious, chants and songs. The original works, before passing through the hands of Bernat Vivancos, are well known, and this confers on them the interest of seeing how the author paraphrases, varies, deforms and celebrates the music that he loves, and makes it his own; the final result is breathtaking. Sometimes it is an unexpected cascade of sounds, sometimes the slight dissonance of a surprising bell, or the organ which attacks unexpectedly… The result shines and transforms itself into an inner landscape of sounds which enriches us and obliges us to rethink everything. Everything? Perhaps I exaggerate: I refer only to life…

From what I have heard, I would say paraphrase for voice, organ, surprise, bell and Vivancos. It’s not a joke; if we stop to listen, we can feel that the author is hidden – or makes himself known, perhaps – in the style. As happens in literature. And furthermore, as a gift of his style, all the pieces offer us musical allusions, requiring us to take personal, imaginary journeys as we listen.

The delicious traditional German song Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (A rose has sprung up; also known in English as “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” or “A Spotless Rose”) which refers to the birth of Jesus, becomes, I think, a musical discovery. I don’t know if it’s nonsense to say this, but listening to the piece for the third or fourth time, a physical image came to mind: Bernat Vivancos’s music works in the same way as “Las Meninas” by Picasso. Vivancos begins as he should, respecting the model, and then he converts it, via Michael Praetorius I suppose, leading it into his own sound world, enlarging it and carrying it away from the original model which, however, is never forgotten, as we see in the mechanics and drive of the theme and variations. The final result is a musical miracle. And I don’t say this because it is my favourite pieces, which isn’t the case. Looking at these works from the perspective of personal taste, one would have to talk about eight musical miracles.

I haven’t attempted to analyse the music because I wouldn’t know how to. I have tried to explain, as simply as I can, the hold this music has on me. Luckily, I still have the music to listen to and observe. I cannot express everything I feel; but I know, precisely, that what touches the ineffable is what has enriched me as a person, and will enrich whoever else listens to this music. I’m sure this is why we say that a work of art grows from a debt of love.

The innovative richness of the works by Bernat Vivancos are, I believe, the clearest and most striking proof of the vitality of this new musical Renaissance. His extraordinary talent and his profound spirituality are placed at the service of a process that is the invention of a new language which, in spite of its complexity and modernity, is capable of transmitting to us pure beauty and emotion. Perhaps this is the great mystery of creativity in any true work of art, in one capable of achieving a perfect balance between technique and emotion, between beauty and spirituality, creating a web of new sounds which, becoming our own, will never cease to move us.

Vivancos’ cities of angels. Text by Lasse Thoresen

Bernat Vivancos’ music is like a city of angels: blissful sounds populated by saintly spirits hiding between the notes as birds in a tree. In saying so I do not simply refer to his string orchestra piece of the same name; rather, I think this title may well serve as a motto for all of his vocal music.

Bernat Vivancos’ musical personality is permeated with the impressions that he received as a choir boy and music student at Montserrat – the eldest existing music conservatory in the Western world, and a sacred place for the Catalonian Catholics. The church with its black Madonna, the legends about the foundation of the church and the monastery, the location of the church in a mountain crevice among phallic looking mountain peaks – all this suggests mystery, adoration, devotion, and the freeing of man’s spirit from daily struggle and worry through its ascension into a sphere of heavenly dreams and visions. This atmosphere is embedded in Vivancos’ music, above all in his choral setting of sacred text. For the human voice is the privileged medium in practically all the world’s religions for heightening the sense of the sacred in connection with the recitation of the Holy Words.

Bernat Vivancos being a pious, former choral boy from a musical and highly cultivated family, could have easily contented himself with ending his musical education once he had become an organist, a brilliant pianist and a highly qualified composer in a traditional stylistic idiom. Instead he chose to challenge this safe musical identity by submitting himself to the rigors of modernist composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. The encounter with music based on sound rather than on notes – music that had neither a describable harmony nor a metrical structure – created a tension in the musical personality of this young composer, one that had to be resolved in a synthesis of a new kind. Some of the keys to this synthesis he found during a half-year stay at the Norwegian Academy of Music, as a consequence of which he was eventually able to shape his own, original style of composition. He chose to remain faithful to his spiritual, musical ideals: he continued making music that had harmony as its basis, and cultivating musical expressions of love and praise. Yet he filtered out from contemporary music elements that changed his conception of musical texture and form, and made an original synthesis of new and old.

The young composer’s erudition and sociability made him a natural choice for the job as professor of composition and orchestration when the Escola superior de música de Catalunya was started a few years ago. But at the same time, his musical roots at Montserrat made their claim on him: he was called as the new conductor of the Monastery’s Boys’ Choir in 2007. Every week of the year he appears several times with his choir in the venerable church which is visited by thousands of believers, tourists and music lovers. He has also the privilege to serve as mentor and example for the boys who receive a full music education in the music conservatory of the Monastery.

Bernat’s music has resisted the exclusiveness of elitist modernity while reaping the benefits from his thorough studies of it. Staying loyal to the musical impressions that first shaped his musical personality, he is now in a position to communicate with a really great number of devoted listeners, conveying to them the secrets of the angels that hover above the Holy Mount.

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Bio en français:

Peu de compositeurs aujourd’hui peuvent se prévaloir d’un style et d’une signature artistique aussi personnels et reconnaissables que ceux de Bernat Vivancos.

Né à Barcelone en 1973, sa personnalité musicale s’est profondément forgée durant ses années comme enfant de chœur au millénaire Monastère de Montserrat, où son maître et père spirituel, Ireneu Segarra, lui a laissé, dès son plus jeune âge, une empreinte qui l’accompagnerait toute sa vie.

Issu d’une famille à la riche tradition musicale, il est le neveu du célèbre trompettiste de jazz Josep Maria Farràs et le fils de Josep Maria Vivancos, organiste pendant cinquante-quatre ans dans plusieurs paroisses de Barcelone. Après son passage à Montserrat, il se consacre à l’étude du piano. Aux côtés de son frère Jordi, également musicien et sociologue, il étudie intensément cet instrument auprès de la pédagogue Maria Canals, développant une remarquable activité de concertiste et obtenant les plus hautes distinctions à la fin de ses études. Parallèlement, il étudie le violon pendant six ans avec la prestigieuse professeure lettone Eva Graubin.

C’est au cours de cette période qu’il entreprend des études de composition auprès du compositeur David Padrós, avec lequel il se forme durant huit années et dont il a toujours défendu la valeur artistique. Passionné par cet art, il franchit une étape décisive et, mettant de côté sa carrière de pianiste, s’installe à Paris pendant cinq ans afin d’étudier la composition au Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse. Il y travaille avec Guy Reibel et Frédéric Durieux (composition), Marc-André Dalbavie (orchestration) et Alain Louvier (analyse).

L’année 2000 marque un tournant déterminant dans son parcours. La découverte de la musique du compositeur norvégien Lasse Thoresen le conduit à Oslo pour approfondir ses études de composition, une expérience qui influencera durablement son orientation artistique et son travail futur. À partir de ce moment, le langage de Vivancos intègre des éléments qui confèrent à son œuvre une identité singulière : une musique aux couleurs sonores et texturales d’une grande richesse, où convergent la tradition modale occidentale et une quête de spiritualité fondée sur une pensée harmonique inspirée du courant spectral.

Ces deux dimensions fondamentales reflètent l’influence profonde de la nature dans l’œuvre de Vivancos : la nature comme racine, comme terre, symbole de la tradition, mais aussi comme présence qui se manifeste à travers les propriétés physiques du son. La nature devient ainsi un moyen d’expérimenter une spiritualité fondée sur la gratitude.

De retour à Barcelone, il obtient un poste de professeur de composition et d’orchestration à l’ESMUC – Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, où, depuis vingt-cinq ans, il a formé plus d’une centaine d’étudiants qui contribuent aujourd’hui activement à la création musicale contemporaine en Catalogne.

Entre 2007 et 2014, il revient à ses origines en étant nommé directeur de l’Escolania de Montserrat. Durant cette période, il mène de nombreuses tournées internationales tout en enrichissant son catalogue d’un important répertoire sacré composé au service du sanctuaire catalan, dans la plus pure tradition du maître de chapelle.

Bernat Vivancos a été compositeur en résidence au Palau de la Música Catalana (2014-2015), où il noue une amitié avec Arvo Pärt, puis compositeur invité à L’Auditori de Barcelone (2021-2022).

Au cours de plus de trente années de carrière, il a développé une vaste production musicale comprenant plus de trois cents œuvres, avec une attention particulière portée à la musique vocale et chorale, sans négliger pour autant un important travail symphonique et de musique de chambre. Son œuvre U (OBC, 2021) ouvre la voie à un langage plus expérimental, riche en textures microtonales, où l’écoute et le culte du son deviennent des éléments centraux de sa démarche créatrice.

En 2011 débute une collaboration particulièrement féconde avec l’un des meilleurs chœurs du monde, le Latvian Radio Choir. Sous la direction de Sigvards Kļava et avec le label Neu Records, il publie Blanc, doublement récompensé par la critique et désigné enregistrement de l’année 2011. En 2016 paraît ensuite Requiem, interprété par les mêmes musiciens.

C’est dans ces œuvres que la musique de Vivancos, avec ses sonorités limpides, ses harmonies extatiques, ses architectures ascendantes et ses éclats de lumière nordique, cherche à réunir foi, sensualité et beauté. Cette collaboration atteint son apogée en 2025 avec la publication de Tenebrae, l’une des œuvres majeures du compositeur, saluée unanimement par la critique après sa création au Festival de Peralada.

Sa curiosité artistique l’a également conduit vers le monde du cinéma avec Somni (Celler de Can Roca, 2013), Tros (Pau Calpe, 2022), Laguna (Šarūnas Bartas, 2025) et, plus récemment, avec la société américaine Imperative Entertainment.

En 2019, il fait une entrée remarquée dans l’univers de la musique populaire grâce à une collaboration emblématique avec la chanteuse Rosalía, dont le projet atteint cinquante millions d’écoutes en un temps record. Par la suite, Bernat Vivancos est sollicité par des figures majeures de la scène internationale telles que Jennifer Lopez (My Party Tour), The Ghost et, plus récemment, la chanteuse Emika (Fountain).

Même dans ces collaborations, Vivancos demeure fidèle à son propre langage musical, établissant un dialogue singulier entre deux univers qui pourraient sembler opposés.

Fidèle à ses origines et désireux de rendre la spiritualité musicale accessible au plus grand nombre, il crée en 2025 la plateforme numérique Ora et Honora (www.oraethonora.cat), un recueil de chants, psaumes et pièces liturgiques destiné à offrir au public une musique sincère et authentique au service de la prière et de la contemplation.

Ayant franchi le cap de la cinquantaine, Bernat Vivancos est aujourd’hui l’un des compositeurs les plus demandés et les plus interprétés sur la scène internationale. Sa musique a été jouée sur les quatre continents par certains des ensembles et chœurs les plus prestigieux d’Europe et des États-Unis.

Bernat Vivancos est marié à la psychologue Susanna Garcia depuis 2007 et est le père de ses deux plus grandes symphonies : Arnau (2009) et Oriol (2010).