His place in the spectral movement of Europe allowed for manipulations of the harmonic series, and led to music that incorporated microtones to replicate these frequencies; a compositional technique he would later refer to as the jeux de couleurs.

After ending his relationship with Christopher Coe, his long-term partner, Vivier frequented Parisian gay bars from where he solicited male prostitutes, one of whom violently attacked him in January 1983.

Claude Vivier is believed to have been born on 14 April 1948 in the vicinity of Montreal, Quebec, and was voluntarily placed in the orphanage of La Crèche Saint-Michel (no longer in operation) the same day by his mother.

[20] He was adopted at the age of two-and-a-half by the working class Vivier family from Mile End, with parents Armand and Jeanne (née Masseau), and their two biological children.

[1][21][22] The couple had suffered a miscarriage many years prior and were looking for a young girl to adopt, only to find each Montreal orphanage having just boys;[20][23] it is unknown why Claude was chosen out of the many in Saint-Michel.

At the age of thirteen, Vivier's parents enrolled him in boarding schools run by the Frères Maristae, a French Catholic organisation that prepared young men for a vocation in the priesthood.

[53] Despite being a devout Catholic himself, Vivier eventually decided an expected career in the church would be impossible given his prior expulsion;[21][44][54] he worked various odd jobs to stay financially afloat after leaving the novitiate, with positions at a hardware store, an Eaton's, and a restaurant in the Laval area.

[79] 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".

[90][91] His works for larger ensembles like orchestras began to show the timbral influence of Arnold Schoenberg in his application of klangfarbenmelodie, and the lushly post-romantic expressivity of Gustav Mahler.

[6][21] He took a job as an organ teacher for a local school, Galipeau Musique, to pay for the rent of his new inner-city apartment, but would continue to struggle financially as he readjusted to life in Quebec.

[95] The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) commissioned an orchestral piece from Vivier the same year, to be played by the National Youth Orchestra of Canada under Marius Constant.

[99][100][101] The Youth Orchestra contacted Vivier soon after receiving the score, saying the work was far too complex and technically difficult to be performed – it would remain unperformed until several years after his death.

[101][113] Zipangu (1980) was later written as a Japanese-infused work for string orchestra, with elements of South Indian Carnatic music (including dronal imitation of the tanbur, rhythmic tala, further raga manipulation and chalanata)[114][115] – the name of the piece is taken from a former and antiquated exonym for Japan, roughly translated to mean "the land of sunrise".

[8] 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.

[126][127] 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.

[131][132][133] 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.

[134][135][136] 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;[g][141] very much inspired by the exploratory works of Grisey, such as Partiels (1975).

[142][143] 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.

[151] Despite troubled financial circumstances, Vivier was confident and pleased to be in the city; spending the majority of his days composing, first working on Trois airs pour un opéra imaginaire (1982).

[155] On the evening of 25 January, the day after severing his relationship with Coe, Vivier solicited an unknown male prostitute at a Parisian gay bar and brought him back to his apartment.

[161] On the evening of Monday, 7 March 1983, Vivier was drinking at a different bar in the Belleville neighbourhood and invited twenty-year-old Pascal Dolzan to spend the night at his flat.

An official memorial concert followed on 2 June in the auditorium of Salle Claude Champagne, with performances of pieces including Prolifération (1969), Pianoforte (1975), Shiraz (1977) and Lonely Child (1980).

[18][71][183] Vivier had various anxiety disorders and extreme nyctophobia;[184][185] which would manifest in his adulthood as oftentimes giving himself a curfew before night fell, and regularly leaving a bedroom light on when going to sleep.

[189] In the last few months of his life, he had begun working on an opera entitled Tchaïkovski, un réquiem Russe, which would have advanced the theory that the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was ordered to commit suicide upon the revelation of his sexual preferences.

[145][188][190] Friends and subsequent historians would comment on how Vivier led a somewhat bohemian lifestyle[191] — he had numerous lovers and homoerotic affairs throughout his life, with the only ones of confirmed identity being Dani Olivieri and Christopher Coe.

[193][194][195] He would say in an interview with Quebec LGBT magazine Le Berdache, "I no longer feel sorry for the fact that I am a faggot",[42][196] reflecting the previous struggles and newfound confidence in accepting his sexuality.

[200] 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.

[204] 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 was a polyglot who would learn multiple languages at the same time – he is known to have been completely fluent in French, German and English, but he also took extended notes and studies on Greek, Latin, Italian, Balinese, Malay, Japanese, and more.

[231] The Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) commissioned the graphic novelist Zviane in 2007 to write a work on Vivier as part of their "Tribute" series, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composer's death.