Volume 23 Issue 2 - October 2017

C
omposer Alexina Louie clearly remembers the blow of Vivier’s
death. “I was in Brussels having a premiere of a piece,” she
recalls. “I had run into Claude on a street in Montreal, and he was
excited because he’d just gotten a Canada Council grant to go to Paris
to write. I’d said I was going to be in Brussels at that time and he said,
‘Well, why don’t we meet up [in Paris]? Just give me a call.’ So I was
calling him from Brussels and the phone never made a connection.
And that was the weekend that he died.”
She also remembers his friendship – visiting him whenever she
was in Montreal, and him doing the same in Toronto. “We would
talk about music – he had very strong ideas about what constituted
good music and bad music, and of course we had little tussles about
things,” she says. “But he was a very special person. [And] his tragic
death hit our community really hard.”
Thinking back on his life and music, Louie describes a composer
who was relentless – someone who stuck to his convictions, no matter
what. “He took a lot of criticism for his music,” she explains. “It
shifted from this European take to this soundworld that was uniquely
his own, based on one melody line with colours that were built
around it. Compared to what was going on in European art music at
that time it was very simple…[But] now, all of these decades later, it’s
that music that he wrote, that is so fascinating, exotic, unusual, that is
now being embraced.”
“Not everyone likes Claude’s music,” she adds. “But it’s so strong,
you can tell it’s his voice when you hear it.”
One of Louie’s major compositions from the year of Vivier’s death
– a large ensemble piece titled Music for a Thousand Autumns,
commissioned by Montreal’s Société de musique contemporaine du
Québec (SMCQ) – was written, in part, for him. “I wrote two pieces
Thursday, October 19 at 8pm
QUATUOR MOSAÏQUES
Europe’s foremost early music quartet, bring their
timing, co-ordination, scrupulous balance and
incredible texturing to Mozart and Haydn.
Alexina Louie
[that year] that were quite important to me at that time,” says Louie.
“One was Music for a Thousand Autumns; one was O Magnum
Mysterium – in Memoriam Glenn Gould. And these premature deaths
really made me reflect a lot about what it takes to be a creative artist.
Because – it’s my experience anyway – that it takes every ounce of
your being to create a piece that you feel worthy. And both of them did
that. They lived life like that.
“I had just moved back to Canada in 1980, and I received a commission
from Serge Garant [at SMCQ],” she continues. “I was working
with these ideas of eternity and what lives on after the death of a
person – and also the fear of writing a piece for Montreal, which at
that time was a city where an outsider was not necessarily always
embraced warmly. There’s a theme in the piece, Music for a Thousand
Autumns, that I connect with Claude. It’s a very simple theme, and
it’s got colouration around it, and it’s my call to Claude. I’m calling out
to Claude: ‘I need inspiration for your town – I want to write a good
piece, I want to write a worthy piece.’ I wrote it with him in mind.”
Louie’s partner Alex Pauk, the founder and director of Esprit
Orchestra, was also a close friend of Vivier’s. Louie describes the
climate in which she, Pauk and Vivier all came of age: one where no
composers had immediate institutional support, and where they were
all used to channelling their own determination to succeed. Pauk
continues on page 74
Tuesday, November 7 at 8pm
BENJAMIN GROSVENOR
The sensational young British pianist, recalling
the great masters like Horowitz, Schnabel and
Cortot, plays Mozart, Brahms and Ravel.
27 Front Street East, Toronto
Tickets: 416-366-7723 | www.stlc.com
thewholenote.com October 2017 | 9