works he completed at the conservatory. Tremblay would come to support and elevate Vivier's status as a serious composer, and developed a close friendship with him. He began his first known romantic relationship in Montreal with a man named Dino Olivieri. A postcard from this period dedicated to Olivieri reads, "Perhaps, I love you very much..." Career Studies in Europe In 1971, following studies with Gilles Tremblay, Vivier studied for three years in Europe, first with Paul Méfano at the Conservatoire de Paris, Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, and finally in Cologne with famous modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. He had first heard Stockhausen's music after attending a 1968 concert of new music in Montreal, and was fascinated with the German composer's experimental approach to timbre. Vivier moved to Cologne hoping to take lessons with him, and was initially rejected. Stockhausen reportedly sight-read one of his manuscripts and exclaimed to his students, "Just look at this! Look at this writing! Would you accept somebody like this as a student? This man will never be a good composer, with writing like that!" He was rejected once more before being formally accepted in Stockhausen's Darmstadt courses for the first semester of 1972, studying additionally with professors Hans Ulrich Humpert and Richard Toop. Vivier was strongly influenced by Stockhausen, and would often revere the composer as the greatest in music history. Stockhausen, however, did not initially think much of the enthusiastic Vivier. Toop once stated, "paradoxically, Stockhausen never seemed to take Claude as seriously as he took most of the other students." This did not deter Vivier, however, "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." He also had a reputation among his classmates, often being teased and ridiculed for his disheveled, eccentric appearance and overt flamboyancy. In spite of this, Vivier did develop amicable relationships with some of his peers, including Gérard Grisey, fellow Québécois Walter Boudreau, and Horațiu Rădulescu. Vivier would end up performing as a percussionist in a Darmstadt production of Rădulescu's piece Flood for the Eternal's Origins (1970), described by the composer as being written for "global sound sources". His early works have aspects that are derivative of his teacher, including radical approaches to serialism and the