Exactly when Vivier returned to Montreal after his journey to Asia is unclear. There are two conflicting pieces of evidence. One is his letter to the Canada Council, already cited, date-stamped March 10, 1977, in which he writes: “I’ve just arrived in Montreal to realize the second part of my project ‘journal d’un voyage en Orient.’” This suggests an arrival date perhaps around the beginning of the month, allowing for a few days to collect his thoughts and to write to them (which he may have felt was an urgent task). The second is the manuscript of a new composition, the organ piece Les Communiantes, the date of which poses a conundrum of the sort that biographers love, but is of very little interest to anyone else.

The eleven-page neat copy of Les Communiantes is signed “Montréal le 22 janv 77.” But measured against all the other documentary sources this date seems odd, indeed improbable. We know Vivier was still in Bali on December 26, 1976, the date of the letter that begins “I will soon have to leave this island”; leaving there a few days later he spent some time in Java, Thailand, then Iran and Egypt, before stopping off for visits in both Paris and Cologne on his way home. The neat copy of the organ piece is unlikely to have been produced during his travels, and could not simply have been dashed off in a day or two immediately upon his return, jet-lagged and exhausted. It must have been the result of many days of work, even at Vivier’s relatively swift rate of productivity. The timescale of all these events does not seem to add up. It is not as though the piece had to be written quickly for a particular opportunity—the premiere was not until March 5, 1978, more than a year later, by Christopher Jackson in Montreal’s Église de l’Immaculée-Conception. It begins to seem as though the date on the manuscript is incorrect. If so, it would not be the first Vivier manuscript to bear a phantom date. Jackson recalls that Vivier, having been commissioned through the Société des Concerts d’orgue de Montréal series, wanted to do “something Balinese” with the commission; but some parts of his first draft were not playable and a revised version followed. This, Jackson, thinks, might account for the long delay between the ostensible completion date and the premiere.