Bernal Flores Zeller

Bernal Flores Zeller (San José, 28 July 1937) is a Costa Rican composer, musicologist and teacher whose work has left a lasting mark on the musical life of his country. He received his first musical training from Carlos Enrique Vargas, and his education was then completed abroad, which gave him first-hand acquaintance with the American academic tradition of the mid-twentieth century.

Between 1951 and 1964 he studied at the Eastman School of Music in New York, where he obtained the degrees of Bachelor of Music (1961), Master of Music (1962) and Doctor of Musical Arts in composition (1964). There he studied piano with José Echániz and composition with Wayne Barlow, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. On completing his studies he undertook a research tour of Central America and, between 1965 and 1966, taught at the Castella Conservatory of the University of Costa Rica. The following year he briefly returned to Eastman to teach theory, after which he went back to his homeland to teach at the Castella, the Escuela Superior de Música and the university.

From his post at the University of Costa Rica he promoted a broad programme of institutional reform and, in 1971, launched degrees in musicology and composition. That same year he joined the management of the music department of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, and helped to establish the School of Musical Arts at the Universidad Rodrigo Facio, as well as studies in music history and composition at the Universidad Autónoma de Centroamérica. Together with Benjamín Gutiérrez Sáenz, he trained a new generation of Costa Rican composers and disseminated the ideas of Hanson in the Spanish-speaking world, translating into Spanish his book Harmonic Materials of Modern Music.

His output includes orchestral, chamber and vocal works, among them symphonies and concertos, as well as an opera based on a text by W. B. Yeats. As a researcher, he produced fundamental writings on the musical history of Costa Rica, from the general introduction of 1971 to studies of figures such as Julio Fonseca and José Daniel Zúñiga. His legacy lies as much in his compositions as in his training of musicians and in the renewal of the institutions that sustain music in his country.