This is a Caputia article. Click here for more information.
This is an article related to Nouvelle Alexandrie. Click here for more information.

Allegra Van Bokhoven

From MicrasWiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

Allegra Van Bokhoven

Allegra Van Bokhoven, pictured in 1758 AN.
Nouvelle Alexandrie

Who's Who of Nouvelle Alexandrie
Full Name Allegra Wilhelmina Van Bokhoven
Titles & Offices Composer (1688 AN-present)
Birth Date 4.X.1665 AN (96 AN years)
Birth Place Blakestown, Northpass, Caputia
Spouse Never married
Children None
Occupation
  • Composer
  • Conductor
Organizations
Known For
Religion Melusinian Faith
Languages
Residence Nouvelle Alexandrie Corcovado, New Caputia
National Origin Caputia Blakestown, Caputia
Citizenship(s)

Allegra Van Bokhoven (born Wilhelmina Van Bokhoven, 4.X.1665 AN) is a Caputian-New Alexandrian composer who has written for horror and mystery films for seven decades. She has more than ninety screen credits and has won the Starlight Award for Best Original Score six times, more than any other composer.[1]

Born at Blakestown in the Caputian state of Northpass, the studio town of the Caputian film industry, she was three years old when the White Plague destroyed the kingdom in 1668 AN. Her family reached Alduria in the dispersal that followed and remained there.[2] She took her first screen credit in 1688 AN and worked without much notice until Hans Backovic engaged her, at the age of fifty-eight, to score Last Night on Botha (1723 AN).[3]

The government of the Federation shut down the film's distribution across every member state of the Community of Goldfield after a single screening at the Judah Film Festival, and Van Bokhoven took no work in Nouvelle Alexandrie for the seven years that followed. The score reached an audience the film never did, circulating on copied recordings while the ban held.[4]

Since 1731 AN she has lived at Corcovado in New Caputia, the Region constituted as a homeland for the scattered Caputian people, and she works with a chorus of her own, the Corcovado Singers.[5] Her most recent score is for The Last Lamp of Ben Aliv (1759 AN), the Twilight Tales Studios ghost story filmed in Judah.

Early life and exile

Van Bokhoven's family were Blakestown people, employed in the sound and orchestra departments of the studios the town was built around after Caputia deregulated its film industry on its founding in 1653 AN.[6] She has no memory of the kingdom. The family left in the general dispersal that followed the dissolution of 30.XV.1668 AN, reached Alduria, and stayed; her nationality changed twice thereafter without her moving again, as Alduria became Alduria-Wechua in 1685 AN and Nouvelle Alexandrie in 1693 AN.

Raised in the Melusinian rite, she learned to sing its liturgy in Audente, the classical tongue that the diaspora holds in common in worship although it carried no common vernacular out of the kingdom.[7] She kept the vigil of the Returning Tide as a child, and has traced everything she has written since to it.

She was registered at birth as Wilhelmina Van Bokhoven. She began working as Allegra in her twenties and kept Wilhelmina as a middle name; she has not explained the change, and both names appear on her citizenship records.

Career

Van Bokhoven has scored more than ninety films and television productions since 1688 AN. Her work before Last Night on Botha was for regional broadcasters and low-budget studios; she has scored at least one picture a year since 1731 AN.

Early work

For thirty-five years Van Bokhoven attracted no particular attention. She scored serials and light drama for regional broadcasters and arranged for theater orchestras in Punta Santiago, taking whatever genre pictures were offered.

Asked in 1744 AN whether she had been offered other kinds of pictures, she said she had been offered them constantly and had found none of them frightening.

Last Night on Botha and the blacklist

Main article: Last Night on Botha

Backovic engaged her in 1723 AN for Last Night on Botha, a psychological horror film set at the Bothan Institute, a finishing school for the daughters of the officer corps of the Benacian Union Defence Force. He was eighty-one and long established. Van Bokhoven had no credit on a major release.[8] The judging panel at the Judah Film Festival read the film as an attack on Humanism in the Benacian Union.

The Federal Humanist Party government shut the film down through the National Communications Commission and the Department for National Mobilisation, barring it from distribution in any member state of the Community of Goldfield and from the domestic market. Backovic accused the government of acting on behalf of its Benacian allies and called the decision "corrupt and sinister"; he had quietly directed at least seven FHP campaign advertisements between 1705 AN and 1730 AN.[9] The data analytics firm Alexandrian Analytical Solutions counted more than two million illegal downloads of the film in the first week of the ban, and a crowdfunding effort for an online release passed 600,000 New Alexandrian écu (NAX€600,000) in four days.[10]

Copied recordings of the score circulated throughout the ban. Van Bokhoven took no work in the Federation between 1723 AN and 1730 AN, the same seven years the film's lead, Eloise Delacroix, spent shut out of the arts.[11] She spent them at Nivardom in Constancia, writing for the institutions of the Royal Caputian Government in Exile and for the Melusinian church, and composed her setting of the Vigil of the Returning Tide (1727 AN) on a commission from Marina Seraphina, Archbishop of Zalae, who had herself been born in the dispersal and never seen the kingdom.[12]

Last Night on Botha was later honored abroad, taking the Golden Cormorant for best film at the Mhazar Vegnese Film Festival in Vegno.[13] It entered the Federal Film Registry of Nouvelle Alexandrie in 1749 AN, the first film admitted to the Registry that had never been distributed in the Federation.

Return and the Cárdenas years

Twilight Tales Studios at Cárdenas hired her in 1731 AN, within a year of the blacklist lifting, and she scored eleven of the studio's pictures over the following two decades. Her scores are central to the low-budget visual style known as Cárdenas Gothic, and the studio's founder, Gabriel Moreno, has credited them with settling the style before his cameras did.[14]

Backovic died in 1737 AN, and Van Bokhoven conducted the music at his funeral. Her first Starlight Award had come the year before, thirteen years after Last Night on Botha, for which she was never eligible for nomination because the film was never released.

Later work

A second and third Starlight followed in 1742 AN and 1746 AN. Among the pictures of these years is the mystery The Second Wife (1741 AN), Van Bokhoven's only film for United Alexandrian Pictures. She has continued to take screen work into her eighties and nineties.

In 1758 AN she scored Bōkon, a Sangunese and West Corumian horror film adapted by Queen Electra Penguinwaffels of Western Corum from the novel by Ito Tatsuya, and co-directed by her. Penguinwaffels has named Backovic as a major influence on the film.[15]

Musical style

The chant of the Melusinian rite, sung in Audente, underlies most of Van Bokhoven's scores: a liturgy belonging to a state that no longer exists. She sets it for massed voices pitched close together and deliberately not quite in unison, an effect she described in 1744 AN as the sound of an untrained congregation singing the rite.

Damaged and altered instruments carry the rest. She uses pianos left untuned for years, bowed metal, and strings played behind the bridge, and keeps a collection of salvaged instruments at Corcovado that she does not have repaired. Two of the pianos came out of Blakestown studios after the collapse.

Long passages of her scores are silent or nearly so, a practice she took from Backovic, whose own films avoided conventional musical cues in favor of silence, ambient sound, and dissonant soundscapes.[16] She left three productions over the removal of silences she considered essential to the score, the last in 1748 AN.

She formed the Corcovado Singers, a chorus of women drawn largely from recent arrivals in New Caputia, in 1734 AN, and has used it on nearly every score since.

Concert works and recordings

Van Bokhoven has written little for the concert hall. Her setting of the Vigil of the Returning Tide (1727 AN) is her only large work not written for a screen and is performed each year at the Great Tidal Temple at St. Melusine on the anniversary of the dissolution of the kingdom.[17] Two concert suites drawn from her film music followed, Botha: Suite for Voices and Broken Piano (1734 AN) and Thirty-One Silences (1752 AN).

Aurora Music Group has issued her recorded scores since 1739 AN. An authorized release of the Last Night on Botha score did not appear until 1751 AN.

Teaching and legacy

Van Bokhoven taught composition at the Punta Santiago Film Academy in periodic residencies from 1738 AN, the year after Backovic's death, until 1752 AN. Backovic had helped found the Academy in 1728 AN with a personal endowment and directed it until he died.[18] She declined the chair of the faculty.

Several composers now working in the Federation's genre studios trained under her, and the Academy named its scoring stage for her in 1756 AN. Her influence on the sound of New Alexandrian horror runs through the Cárdenas Gothic pictures she scored between 1731 AN and 1752 AN and the studios that followed them.

Personal life

Van Bokhoven has never married and has no children. She has lived at Corcovado since 1731 AN and gives few interviews.

Awards and honors

Selected filmography

Year Film Director Notes
1691 AN Cold Harbor Television film
1698 AN The Vellum Room
1706 AN Salt and Iron
1714 AN The Third Sister
1719 AN The Quiet Tenant Mystery
1723 AN Last Night on Botha Hans Backovic Distribution banned across the Community of Goldfield
1731 AN The Salt House Gabriel Moreno First film after the blacklist; Twilight Tales Studios
1733 AN The Hollow Coast Gabriel Moreno
1736 AN Nine Nights at Ravaillac Gabriel Moreno Starlight Award for Best Original Score
1738 AN The Weeping Stair
1741 AN The Second Wife Mystery; United Alexandrian Pictures
1742 AN Bone China Starlight Award for Best Original Score
1745 AN The Long Ward
1746 AN The Drowned Choir Gabriel Moreno Starlight Award for Best Original Score
1749 AN A House at St. Melusine
1750 AN The Understudy Mystery; Starlight Award for Best Original Score
1753 AN Vespers
1754 AN The Second Bell Starlight Award for Best Original Score
1757 AN What the Tide Leaves Starlight Award for Best Original Score
1758 AN Bōkon Electra Penguinwaffels Sangunese and West Corumian production
1759 AN The Last Lamp of Ben Aliv Renata Corvo Twilight Tales Studios; Cárdenas Gothic

See also

References

  1. ^ Starlight Awards; National Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
  2. ^ Caputian diaspora; Caputia.
  3. ^ Last Night on Botha.
  4. ^ Last Night on Botha.
  5. ^ New Caputia; Caputian diaspora.
  6. ^ Cinema of Caputia.
  7. ^ Caputian diaspora, Language.
  8. ^ Hans Backovic.
  9. ^ Last Night on Botha; Hans Backovic, Personal Politics.
  10. ^ Last Night on Botha.
  11. ^ Eloise Delacroix.
  12. ^ Matriarch of New Zalae; Church of Caputia.
  13. ^ Golden Cormorant; Mhazar Vegnese Film Festival.
  14. ^ Cinema of Nouvelle Alexandrie, Independent Studios.
  15. ^ Bōkon; Electra Penguinwaffels, Interests.
  16. ^ Hans Backovic, Artistic Style and Themes.
  17. ^ Matriarch of New Zalae; St. Melusine.
  18. ^ Hans Backovic.
Retrieved from "https://micras.org/wiki/index.php?title=Allegra_Van_Bokhoven&oldid=415544"