The Sagrada Familia is architecture, it is the cross, the towers, the monumentality. But Gaudí did not conceive it only from this perspective: he drew it thinking of it not only as a building, but as a sound box, as an instrument of never-before-seen dimensions for Barcelona. Gaudí calculated everything: drawings, tests, models, and extensive research to find the bells that would make the city vibrate. However, the bells were lost during the Civil War, and only scarce documentation and photographs remained.
After decades of research and a lot of mathematics, the architect and musician Galdric Santana has managed to get closer to that original design, and cast three bells. These three tubular bells materialized by the also curator of the Gaudí Year will be protagonists of the concert that will be offered this afternoon in Plaza Catalunya for free, in homage to the architect. A day after the centenary of his death and the blessing of the Tower of Jesus by the Pope, the musicians have been rehearsing in the square, with the protagonist bells at the back of the stage.
Accompanying the bells and inspired by the system Gaudí conceived, a symphonic work will translate into the sound that the architect had projected for the temple with the free concert. The work is named 84 Bells, the same ones Gaudí envisioned for the Nativity Façade —and which are by no means the only ones he designed for the temple—. Composed by the American David Cieri, the music will fill the square led by conductor Marin Alsop, with the performance of the London Philharmonia Orchestra and the Cor de Cambra de l'Orfeó Català, along with soprano Núria Rial.
Santana will also have his role in the concert: he will play the three bells, which will resonate from the back of the stage. The event will begin at 8 PM at the F1 Barcelona Fan Village in Plaza de Catalunya, as part of the official program of the Gaudí Year 2026, a day after its institutional premiere at the Palau de la Música Catalana.
The concert will allow the city to hear for the first time the sound universe imagined by Gaudí for the basilica. The architect not only designed what the temple should look like, but also its sound. The research, which has emerged from the Gaudí Chair of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) —of which Santana is the director— transfers this sound to the concert, in a project supported by the American philanthropic couple residing in Barcelona Renée Chan and Patrick Mitchell.
The concert will allow an approximation to the conception of the Sagrada Familia as an instrument, through the three tubular bells that symbolize a complex system that rises in the temple visualized by Gaudí. Behind the three bells there is extensive research of more than a decade, with infinite mathematical formulas, sound graphs and overtone calculations, which show how Gaudí's work hybridizes art and science.
The complexity scales up the towers of the Nativity Façade to locate the 84 bells, one for each key of an organ from Gaudí's time. In practice, the architect foresaw that the bells would be played using a keyboard: "It will be like a giant piano, with the sound of bells," illustrates Santana, who argues that the Sagrada Familia will not be finished until it has this sound system.
"The idea is to have the project finished when the Glory Façade is completed, in ten or twelve years, and then the bells can be installed." There will be bells of all sizes, from the smallest, 60 centimeters, to the largest, an impressive 18 meters. Gaudí calculated the dimensions with the intention that the sound would reach three kilometers from the basilica; this would allow it to be heard from points such as Sant Andreu, the Clínic or the sea.
This sound system, however, goes beyond this facade. Gaudí designed another system of liturgical bells for the Glory Façade, with 48 more pieces. For the Tower of the Mare de Déu, he envisioned ring-shaped bells, with a drier sound and less reverberation to symbolize purity, while for the Passion Façade he imagined an organ sound. But one has to start somewhere, in this case, the three tubular bells of the Nativity Façade, which are already ready to be heard this afternoon in Plaça Catalunya.