On November 6, 1979, Vivier arrived in France at the beginning of a month-long stay in Europe. The exact purpose of his visit remains unknown, though he would surely have been glad to escape the Quebec winter for a few weeks; and although the visit was not tied to any performances of his music there, it may well have had the aim of promoting some. After a few days in France, a card postmarked November 15 to his Montreal friend Thérèse Desjardins announced his arrival in Germany: “Finally Cologne—and also what you read for me in the cards! The pieces of mine that are the most appreciated here are those that are the least appreciated in Montreal! Anyway, some pieces of mine will be played in Paris and in Cologne.” (Regarding what the cards had said, Desjardins recalls: “We always did card-reading in the family. I did it very often with Claude. … the cards often ‘spoke’ and Claude’s said that the future of his music was somewhere else than Quebec!!! I used the cards to encourage him to go and work in Europe. A game, but one that he really liked.”) In Cologne he recorded a radio program about Canadian music. From there he went to Holland; his passport was stamped in Arnhem on November 18. He gave a seminar at his old stomping ground, the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, talking about some recent works, including Journal, the most recent large-scale work of his to have been performed. He was back in Montreal on December 7.

Vivier’s trip to Europe that autumn, and particularly the days he spent in Paris, was to transform his musical language. Frustratingly, it is impossible to verify whether he actually met with Grisey or Murail (though it seems from the conversation with Walter Boudreau about Orion that he expected to); by 1979 he was relatively out of touch with their recent music, and his renewed encounter with it had the spirit of a new discovery. Whether in conversation, or from the brief flipping through the pages of some of their scores, he came upon the technical idea that, in retrospect, can be seen to be exactly the technique he was looking for, the idea that made possible the composition of the majority of his own works from that point forward.

The technique goes by different names.