A Musical Rabbit Hole
A lucky writer grabs at any handhold(s) the Universe offers them
When I started writing the quasi-science-fiction/mystery novel which became the still-in-progress 23kpc, about a decade ago, I coincidentally came across this gorgeous choral work: To the Field of Stars.
In particular, even before I’d heard the music, I read a description of it by composer Gabriel Jackson, which reads in part (emphasis added):
Over the years many concert programs have been devised to relive the medieval pilgrims’ journey in song, drawn from the codex and other sources, and new pieces have been composed which also reimagine the experience of travelling the Way of St. James.
So the challenge with this piece was to try to say something new and worthwhile about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela that hadn’t already been said. I didn’t want to write a literal account of the journey, a series of postcards from the pilgrimage route […] for that has already been done and done very well. So while To the Field of Stars is about the pilgrimage to Santiago, it is also about journeying in a wider sense — the physical, emotional and psychological struggle to reach a long-sought after and life-changing goal.
One of the first things that struck me was the possible etymological origin of “Compostela” as “campus stellae” — the field of stars. This suggested a literal field of stars, and that notion became the sixth movement of the piece, a sustained, glistening carpet of murmured stars’ names underpinning a flickering high cello descant.
In order to articulate and give structure to the journey, the piece is divided into seven movements, seven “stations” as it were, points of meditation and reflection which are separated by choral refrains and brief cello envoix…
Most obviously, of course, this appealed to me as something hypothetically in the program notes of the soundtrack of a journey aboard an asteroid retrofitted, Deco-style, as a cruise ship crossing the galaxy. (A pilgrimage! Physical, emotional, and psychological struggles! Murmured stars’ names!)
But as a non-musician, I couldn’t help being mystified by some of it. I knew, sorta, about the descant bit. But what the heck, I asked myself, was meant by “cello envoix”? Envoix itself, apparently, is French for “shipments.” Broken into two words — en voix — it translates to “in voice.”1
And yet there I was at the moment, trying to figure out what to call a company which employs spacegoing diplomats, of a sort — the very company, in this case, which converted the asteroid to a “spacecruiser” in the first place… making no actual profit from the venture, just funding it all by mining the interior of the asteroid for precious minerals (worth trillions of 21st-century US dollars)? Certainly envoix might also suggest, like, envoys…?
…and then, in another one of those problem-solving coincidences which writers cherish when they trip over one, I discovered that a Finnish non-profit is commonly referred to as a rekisteröity yhdistys: a “registered association,” abbreviated RY.
Hence, the name of the “ambassadorial” non-profit subsidiary of my transnational megacorporation of the future. I have no idea how the word, cobbled together from two separate languages (neither of which I speak!), would be pronounced. But ever since, it’s been stuck in my head:
EnvoixRY, it is.
I’m guessing that cello envoix, then, means something like “a passage featuring multiple cellos ‘speaking’ as one.”