Chants for Chorus a cappella + 1 instrument, composed in 1973. It contains five movements:
01. I
02. II
03. III
04. IV
05. V

♫ 01. I
© Soupir Editions S206


♫ 02. II
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♫ 03. III
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♫ 04. IV
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♫ 05. V
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Chants, for seven women’s voices, represents a second beginning for the young composer. Late in 1972, studying in Germany with Stockhausen, Vivier had a visionary dream in which he had a revelation of ‘the very essence of musical composition’. As a consequence, he began work on Chants, which represented for him ‘the first moment of my life as a composer’. The work is a requiem, with three women ‘in the presence of death’ and their three shadows, the seventh voice being, symbolically, Vivier’s own, ‘a voice that has forgotten what it wanted to say’. The texts are by Vivier himself (invented words and syllables, created during the process of composing) and extracted from Christian liturgy and the mystical Les Clavicules de Salomon. Amazingly for a twenty-four year old, Chants is not Vivier’s first work to be inspired by the subject of death, and would not be the last.