“A journey into the depths of myself” (1976–77)

In 1981 Vivier told an interviewer: “My whole relationship with Asian music was one in which I avoided all possible preconceptions. I didn’t want to do anything about it before going there. I just wanted to put myself there, like a child, and learn it out of nothingness.” While this is probably a fair reflection of his state of mind as he began his journey in September 1976, preconceptions could not be entirely avoided. Writing to Harry Halbreich that March, he had commented that one of his intentions when there, besides composing, was “a lot of thinking about music and its fundamental forms of expression.” This perhaps reflects his feeling—a common idea in the minds of western intellectuals—that Asian music had remained closer to these “fundamental forms of expression” than had contemporary European music, a sense that the musicologist Curt Sachs had captured in the title of his 1962 book The Wellsprings of Music . In that sense, right from the outset, Vivier’s trip was a sort of pilgrimage, a wish for musical—and, we may safely assume, personal—refreshment and renewal. In making a journey such as this he was following in the footsteps of several close friends and mentors. In the previous decade, Stockhausen had become something of a world traveler. He wrote and spoke extensively about his recent experiences, notably in Japan, where his music was featured prominently at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka. Gilles Tremblay had made a visit to Bali, Java, and Korea in 1972, where he had wanted to experience firsthand “the relation of the sacred and art”; and his Montreal composer colleagues John Rea and José Evangelista had recently returned from Bali, brimful of enthusiasm for its music and culture. This is worth remembering given the myth that has arisen in some of the writing on Vivier: that his travels in Asia in the autumn of 1976 somehow mark him out as a great composer-traveler, a musical Marco Polo restlessly moving onward in search of new experience and inspiration—that, in short, as one recent article puts it, his was “a life dictated by travel.” Even a casual examination of the facts dispels this myth.

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