“In his works Stockhausen wants to expand the field of human consciousness, to show us new planets,” wrote Vivier in December 1978 of the music of his former teacher. “But who is Stockhausen the man? In Momente, at the moment ‘KK’ (K: Klang/sound and K: Karlheinz) he gives us his self-portrait: a great call, solitary and sad; his need to speak comes from a great solitude, from a need to communicate with the rest of the cosmos.” It is striking that these last words seem to apply equally well to teacher and student: for what better characterization could there be of Vivier’s own music than “a great call, solitary and sad,” its particular blend of expressive intensity and disciplined calculation issuing from “a need to communicate with the rest of the cosmos?” Reading Vivier’s text, a brief program note written for a performance of Stockhausen’s Mantra by the SMCQ in Montreal, it is clear that the reverence he feels toward his former teacher’s work is tinged with empathy for its expressive aims—even with a degree of identification with the person of its creator.

That Stockhausen played a crucial role in Vivier’s musical development is beyond question. In the autobiographical note Vivier supplied for a performance of his Lettura di Dante in Toronto in 1975, he noted: “Born in Montreal in 1948. Born to music with Gilles Tremblay in 1968. Born to composition with Stockhausen in 1972.” Indeed, the widespread view is that, during the years he studied formally with Stockhausen at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne (1972–74), Vivier hero-worshipped the German composer. Gilles Tremblay feels that Vivier was ébloui (dazzled) by Stockhausen; while Vivier’s fellow student Kevin Volans recalls that, at that time, “the general perception of Claude was that he was THE Stockhausen student. He idolized him, and idolized his way of working. It was intriguing how Claude managed to reconcile that with his own sort of mystic Catholicism”—almost as though, Volans seems to imply, Vivier viewed his teacher as a sort of god. The English musicologist Richard Toop, Stockhausen’s teaching assistant for the academic year 1973–74, recalls that “Claude was by far Stockhausen’s most loyal adherent in the class (in fact, I think of loyalty as one of Claude’s key characteristics), and the only one to share Stockhausen’s spiritual outlook to any significant degree.