he wrote everything he had learned from local villagers, including an anatomical chart with various body parts labelled in Balinese. He described his Bali trip as, "a lesson in love, in tenderness, in poetry and in respect for life". Ensemble pieces Pulau Dewata (1977) and Paramirabo (1978) are both directly influenced by the Balinese gamelan, with a modified form of kotekan (a method of rhythmic alternation akin to the European hocket) being used between two atonal melodies. Vivier concluded his journey in Thailand in January 1977 and returned to Montreal, cutting the trip six months short of what he had initially anticipated. The reason why has been disputed, but he wrote to the Canada Council for the Arts that the trip had rendered him, "... exhausted, nervously and physically". Burgeoning career Working with Québécois pianist Lorraine Vaillancourt, composer John Rea, and Spanish expatriate José Evangelista at the Université de Montréal, he began a series of concerts featuring new performances of contemporary works entitled Les Événements du Neuf. He wrote some pieces for the Québec dance ensemble Le Groupe de la Palace Royale, including the ballets Love Songs and Nanti Malam (1977), both showing the Balinese influence he would continue to retain. Lonely Child (1980) was written as another commission from the CBC, this time with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Serge Garant. Vivier's small-scale opera Kopernikus (1979) was premiered in its orchestral form on 8 May 1980 at the Théâtre du Monument National in Montreal, with Vaillancourt conducting the orchestra. He briefly travelled to Europe in November of the same year to confer with the French spectral composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, the former of whom was an old friend of Vivier's from the Darmstadt school. They would together study, "spectral calculation[s] of the relationships between the bass note and the melodic note". Spectral music would later become the main thesis of Vivier's last compositions. He would label his spectralist techniques as jeux de couleurs ("play of colours"), a blending of harmony and orchestral timbre that rises above a fundamental two-voiced texture; very much inspired by the exploratory works of Grisey, such as Partiels (1975). Jeux de couleurs arose from Vivier's preoccupation with the vertical manifestation of melody, and how various instruments of the orchestra could be used to replicate specific tone colours through the harmonic series. This is a considerable departure from the principles of