Ton (Antonie) Meijer was born Nov. 21, 1941 on the (then) tiny island of Urk in the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands, where his father was briefly employed as a teacher. Since his mother could not bear the loneliness in the very closed community on the island his parents moved back to the mainland shortly after his birth. (The moving truck actually rode on the ice covering the Zuiderzee, due to the very severe winter of Feb. 1942.) He spent his boyhood in the province of Drente and entered the Technological University of Eindhoven at the age of 16 to study Electronics. After a few years he switched to Physics and graduated in 1965 with honors in Nuclear Physics.
After a few years as a researcher he made a career switch and joined IBM as a computer programmer. After a number of years he became an independent ICT consultant. In that period he published two books: “Computer Network Architectures” (with Paul Peeters, Pitman 1982) and “IBM´s Systems Network Architecture, a tutorial” (Pitman, 1987). He became a frequent speaker at venues all around the world on such topics as computer networking and technology forecasting.
A second career switch was forced on him when his wife Cisca was diagnosed with cancer and needed his care, until she died in 1996. After a number of years of unemployment and odd jobs such as dog trainer, he became a high school physics teacher. After his retirement in 2005 he settled with his second wife José in a quiet town in Belgium, just south of Eindhoven. Here fate struck again: José died of breast cancer in 2017.
End of 2020 he returned to The Netherlands where he lives near Eindhoven with his friend Laura.
As a lifelong singer in both church and oratoria choirs, he is interested in ritual/ceremony and in church music,
although he has no formal musical training.
He is a retired bass singer from the Capella Vesperale Eindhoven but still enjoys making arrangements of
settings for the Preces and Responses for the Dutch language and finding appropriate chants for the psalms (in Dutch) in evensong.
Because of his interest in Anglican chanting he started in 2013 to collect Anglican Chants and did set up the website www.anglicanchant.nl. The underlying database now has over 38.000 references for over 11.000 unique chants (as of Mar. 1, 2023).
Recently he finished his project to create Anglican chants for all psalms, based upon the metric Genevan melodies with the harmonisation by Claude Goudimel. The resulting book - with Dutch psalmtexts - was published in May 2023 (boekenbestellen.nl, search for "Chants bij de Geneefse Psalmen").
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