New project is bringing Vivier to the world

When the English new-music ensemble Psappha was rehearsing its performance of four pieces by the late Québécois composer Claude Vivier, the musicians found themselves debating a mystery. Had Vivier prophesied his own murder in one of the works, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul), or had he somehow planned his own death in order to achieve that very immortality?

"We talked about this," says Tim Williams, Psappha's director. "We wondered if he decided this is what was going to happen - whether he arranged for it to happen as he was writing this piece in order to make himself immortal, or whether it was just a strange premonition."

Vivier was just 34 in 1983 when he was stabbed to death in his Paris apartment by a man he'd picked up in a bar. The mystery was heightened not just by the title of the composition he was working on, but also by the fact that there's a line in it about being stabbed to death - by a stranger he'd just met.

Vivier is now recognized as one of Canada's greatest modern composers, but the gaminess of his fast- and short-lived life has often overshadowed his work. Williams, searching for new works for his ensemble, didn't know any of these details when he came across Glaubst and was, as he says "really affected by the thing. It was so amazing, so terrifying. "

On Monday, Psappha's concert of four Vivier works, performed with the BBC Singers at Lancaster University in northern England, will be available online as part of a pioneering effort to get new music out to the masses (visit psappha.com).

"New music has a limited audience. Wherever you perform there will be 50 or a hundred people who are really interested," says Williams, "but if you broadcast it on the Internet, think of how many people in towns and cities around the world will be able to hear it and see it."

In Vivier, Williams says they have a composer with an "utterly unique voice." Vivier's uncertainty over his roots - born in Montreal, he never knew his birth parents - and expulsion from the seminary where he was studying, at the age of 18, were the foundation for an unorthodox life. He studied with Gilles Tremblay in Montreal and then, thanks to a grant from the Canada Council, he was able to further his studies in Europe, first in Holland and then in Cologne, with teachers who included Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Williams isn't sure how much influence the German master had on the young French-Canadian upstart, though. "When Vivier first went to study with him, Stockhausen didn't like him. He threw him out of class because he smelled. Vivier wasn't big on personal hygiene."

The composer's travels through Asia had a huge influence on his work: One of the pieces in the Psappha concert is Shiraz, a piano composition from 1977, that Vivier wrote after visiting Iran. His time in Bali and Japan informed his works and the instruments used in them.

When Psappha and the BBC Singers began rehearsing the concert, the complexities and ambiguities of the scores threw up certain challenges. The chorus had never sung Vivier's music before. "This," one of the singers told Williams, "is as hard as it gets."

Williams, who is Psappha's percussionist as well as its director, was facing hurdles of his own, because Vivier wasn't particularly specific about the sounds he wanted. Sometimes a notation would just say "gong," but Psappha had no clue which particular Indonesian gong this meant. And the 1980s keyboards that Vivier used had Williams on a fruitless scramble through the musical-instruments section of eBay.

Finally, Williams spent hours on the phone with Walter Boudreau of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec, a contemporary of Vivier's who gave him insights into achieving the composer's sounds. "His music is so original," Williams says. "When you hear Vivier, you know it's Vivier. The best composers always have an individual voice, and he is exactly that."

There's a hope among the English musicians that this webcast will help bring Vivier's works into the foreground, quite apart from the interest sparked by his short life and sudden death. "It's hard to say why he has been so neglected," Nicholas Kok, who conducted the Vivier concert, told the Guardian newspaper. "Is it because he was Canadian? Is it because he wrote sensual, intensely personal music which doesn't conveniently fit into any modernistic school? Is it because he was gay? It's unfortunate that the one thing people do know about Vivier is that he died a violent death, which gives his legacy an aura of sickly glamour. But it's time to reappraise his work as music, not just the soundtrack to a lurid, psycho-sexual biography."

Psappha and the BBC Singers' performance of four pieces by Claude Vivier will be available at psappha.com from March 17.