I first met the Canadian composer Claude Vivier ten years after his death. Someone had sent me a tape—the piece was Lonely Child for soprano and orchestra—and what I heard was as simple as a nursery rhyme, as tragic as a Mahler adagio, as formal as a noh play. It went on its way with harmonies glistening high above the slow vocal melody. It was like nothing I had ever heard, and it was beautiful. To be drawn into this music was indeed to meet another person and, through that other person, another world.

Such experiences, arriving out of the blue, are rare: I had to hear more, know more. I got hold of all the Vivier recordings that were available, all of them Canadian releases, and from the liner notes I gathered a few items of information about the composer, though not much more than the fact that—after just a decade of accomplished work, and little more than three years of total mastery—he had been killed in Paris in 1983, at the age of thirty-four. The fuller story—the story of a life lived, right to the point of death, for music—only began to come together after I had spent a while in Montréal, studying the scores at the Centre de Musique Canadienne, reading the composer's articles and interviews, and talking to people who had known him.