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.
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.
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.
But when the Belgian state refused to recognize Andries' music education program with a formal degree, he quit.
He founded the Vocal Ensemble Philippus de Monte in 1961—he'd conduct it for nine years—and from 1963 till 1965 he also led the Brussels Terkamerenkoor, consisting of professionals, members of the BRT choir.
Upon the sudden death of Jan Van Bouwel, the conductor of the BRT choir, on 1 December 1969, Vic Nees was asked to replace him temporarily.
The BRT being a national institution, Nees's task included making music by Belgian (and later specifically Flemish composers[3]).
He was interested in discovering little-known repertoire, and he could afford to ignore popular works, as he made mainly studio recordings and did not have to worry about filling a concert hall.
He unearthed and performed a great many works, shorter pieces as well as major works, of Flemish romantic composers whose scores exhibited real artistic quality, like Joseph Ryelandt's Maria, Arthur Wilford's Liebeslieder im Mai and Herbstwinde, Franz Uyttenhove's Stabat Mater, Karel Candael's Het Marialeven and Oscar Roels's Prometheus.
As he preferred to maintain only his position as conductor of the radio choir, which gave him time to discover unknown works and above all to compose.
From 1988 till the end of his career Nees got little support from Alexander Rahbari, at the time conductor of the Flemish Radio Orchestra, who was not very choir-minded.
He conducted his own Psalm 91 Bonum est confiteri (1988) and De Feesten van angst en pijn (The Feasts of Fear and Pain), Op.
In this he was also helped by a long-running monthly BRT 3 program, Het koorleven in Vlaanderen (Choral Life in Flanders), which he was a driving force of.
He was often asked to sit on juries of musical competitions, not only in Flanders (where his jury "duties" were too numerous to count) and in Wallonia, but also abroad: in Den Bosch (1963), The Hague (1967), Middlesbrough (1968), Cork International Choral Festival (1971), Arezzo (1988), Neuchâtel and Aosta (2006); Cooremans (2011:48) also lists Arnhem, Tours, Malta and Caracas without dates.
Three of his favorite text writers were Albert Boone, SJ, a musicologist and conductor, Mieke Martens, a poet and member of the BRT choir, and Jo Gisekin [nl] (pen name of Leentje Vandemeulebroecke), a well-known Flemish poet whose work has also been set to music by Ernest van der Eyken and Wilfried Westerlinck.
He had begun his career by writing almost exclusively a cappella music for choirs, but around 1970 he added to his works solo voices, narrators and instrumental soloists, often in unusual combinations.
He also began to write clusters, passages to be sung or spoken aleatorically, some of which even required changing the order of the syllables of the words.
Besides many short articles on Vic Nees, there are now (2015) six major works on him: Cooremans et al. 2011 (full reference below, in §10) and five unpublished theses: