positive for AIDS in the early 1980s, around the time the two were dating. Philippe Poloni would say years later, "I think if Claude didn't die [of murder] he would have died of AIDS. I think his path was going that way." Coe himself died from AIDS-related complications in 1994. Ethnicity Despite having no evidence to suggest Vivier was ethnically Jewish, he would maintain throughout his life that he was — an experience with a ouija board in Montreal would cement this belief, "the 'oracle' call[ed] out (in answer to Vivier's question 'who am I?') the name 'Jew' ". After the 1982 Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant attack, an antisemitic mass murder which occurred less than five kilometres from where Vivier was staying in Paris, he had begun to fear he would fall victim to a racially motivated hate crime. He wrote in a letter to Desjardins, "I've never before experienced racism and its animality so deeply in my skin," referring to the racism in France he perceived at the time. Music Overview Vivier is believed to have only forty-eight surviving compositions completed before his death. They vary in ensemble from choral works, chamber pieces, experimental tape music, large-scale opera and otherwise. Vivier's musical style would shift consistently throughout his career; he was once an advocator of serialism, which had taken a hold on much of Europe's composers in the mid to late 20th century, but would abandon it and come to resent its popularity in later years: Vivier is considered to be one of the founders of spectral music, and is placed among the early group of pioneers referred to as the "German Feedback" group, alongside fellow composers and Stockhausen pupils including Péter Eötvös and Clarence Barlow. Parallels between Vivier's compositional style and that of Olivier Messiaen have been noted, especially regarding the use of dense chords in homophonic textures and use of east Asian instrumentation, such as tuned nipple gongs and gamelan-adjacent keyboards and melodic idiophones. He is considered one of the most important alumni of the Darmstadt school, in terms of his contribution to the postmodernist trend that flourished after his death. Some musicologists, however, classify Vivier as a postmodernist composer in his own right, who wrote some of the first and most consequential pieces of this era. Many of his works center around important themes of Christianity, including the chamber pieces Jesus erbarme dich (1973), Liebesgedichte (1975)