Out with the old (to some extent) and in with the new • November 26, 2011

As you've probably noticed on my calendar, I've been attending the screenings of several films in the Canadian Film Institute's European Union Film Festival. Believe it or not, this does constitute work in a sense. Whenever I'm not doing church work or playing with the band, I focus on multilingual material, and the EUFF provides me with a perfect opportunity to look for new material in various languages. This is how I discovered the Greek song "Ένα σπασμένο φτερό"—it's featured in the movie Ψυχραιμία, which played at the EUFF in 2009. As a result of this year's festival, I'm adding two new songs to my repertoire, the Czech song "Když zavřu oči" from Protektor and Quadron's Danish song "Herfra hvor vi står" from Se min kjole. The festival goes on for another week or so, and I'm hoping to find even more musical treasures in that time. I anticipate I will be asked to do the music for a ham supper gig in March 2012, the same one I did this past March, and if I am, I plan to include those songs in that show.

Later on today the Roman Catholic churches in all English-speaking countries will be starting to implement a new English translation of the Roman Missal. Because music ministers in this denomination are not allowed to "mix and match" when it comes to settings of the parts of the mass, this means that all of the settings that we have sung at St. Augustine's Parish since Vatican II have to be scrapped in favor of new settings. Most of Canada will be getting its new settings from either Celebrate in Song (a new hymnal recently published by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops) or the 2011-2012 edition of the Living With Christ Sunday Missal. This will be challenging to me in that I am preparing composite music programs for three different parishes, only two of which will have the music for the new mass settings. Given that I'm using all three settings (plus an adaptation of a more familiar fourth one) and rotating them every several weeks, I just hope the third parish will be able to learn the new settings without too much difficulty despite its not having all the music it needs. Dominus Deus, auxiliare nobis!!

Whew! At long last I have time enough to bring you all up to date. The last twenty-one months or so have seen a couple of permanent changes—some of them good, and some of them saddening.

First, let's start with the bad news. My dad died last November of complications from pneumonia and other ailments. Although he was something of a musician himself, having played trumpet in dance bands in his heyday (his horn was a 1940 Holton Collegiate), I don't think he ever played professionally, at least not to the level of trying to make a living at it. He developed some rudimentary keyboard ability and helped me get started learning the piano when I was five years old. I had hoped I would get to play for all the residents at Carleton Lodge while he was there, but I never got the chance.

Secondly, in February Kira decided to hang up her guitar, at least for the time being. Speaking as a fan, I was deeply saddened by this news—for me, it was like Dad dying all over again. But speaking as a musician, it was very easy for me to understand her position. Sometimes musicians have to make compromises in order to survive in the music industry, and even I have been no exception. However, I do have hope that she will one day come back.

Shortly after I learned of Kira's decision, I was booked to do another ham supper gig at St. Augustine's Parish, and I decided to make the show something of a tribute to her. So back into my basement studio I went, and spent a week and a half preparing nineteen new songs. I did one song each in French, Croatian, Turkish and Greek, but beyond that, every song I did was in German—and it was one of hers. As something of a further tribute to her, my set list was loosely based on the set list she had used for one of the gigs on her Deine Insel tour of 2009.

As for the good changes, the first started when our choir director at St. Augustine's finally decided he'd had enough. He was not the best fit for us, and he wasn't professional enough to see this for himself. As a result of his departure, I took over his duties as choir director in January. Though my skills are weak in that area, the choir is fortunately small enough to be able to give me feedback on what they need.

Starting on November 27, we will be using a new English translation of the Roman Missal. As a result, we will be using a new hymnal called Celebrate in Song, which will supplement the material we have been using in Catholic Book of Worship III. Because of the new translation, we will no longer be able to use our existing Gloria, Sanctus and memorial acclamation settings, although I have adapted some of these for the new translation.

Second, I have recently taken over the music for the 11:00 mass at St. Elizabeth's. Our choir director there has had to put her ailing mother in a senior's home—this is much the same situation that my mom was in with my dad last year—and so she has decided it would be too emotionally difficult to continue directing the choir. As a result, I have begun introducing to the congregation a variety of new settings of the parts of the mass—a breath of fresh air that I have long felt they need, as they have mostly stuck to the same settings week after week for years.

And third, I can add another band to my list of influences. I discovered Amiina in late July and can't help but be mesmerized by their soft, soothing music. If you're looking for the right music to absolutely unwind to at the end of a hectic day, theirs is perfect. The group started out as a string quartet at the University of Reykjavik and performs on an eclectic array of instruments, including glockenspiel, glass harp, musical saw, zither and even a Casio VL-1 keyboard!

Hotter than Ice is still plugging away. We did a gig at the Ukrainian Hall on Byron back in March, and did another one there on September 24.

In the meantime, I've started working intermittently with Anne Steinberg, a local real estate agent who sings on the side, and she and I recently did a gig at the Giuseppina Palace Banquet Hall. She and I may soon be doing additional gigs there, sometimes together and sometimes separately.

Finally, as you can see, I have a new website. The host of my old one, ellhol.de, recently announced to its users that it will be shutting down its free websites at the end of this year—if I'm reading their German right, they say that technology has progressed to the point where they can no longer provide the kind of quality service that today's websites demand. We've come a long way from the days when web page design was so simple that HTML coding was little more than an <html><head>...</head><body>...</body></html> structure and the text in between.

As a result, my website is now here on the webs.com domain. I want to eventually set up my own Web domain, but with Christmas coming soon and the implementation of the new translation of the Roman Missal coming four weeks earlier than that, I felt I didn't have time to set that up. I already feel the need to rewrite my ellhol.de page's front page so that it will direct people here in the two months that it still can.

The structure of this new web page also means that, for the time being at least, I will no longer be able to post anything in German. Even though I have worked with the language for a few years now, my lack of fluency in it is still at the point where I need to use an online dictionary from time to time when I write in it. I've had so much on the go in the last couple of years that I have not been able to devote a lot of time to studying it. However, I will still write my Chalk Talk and "Man and His World" blogs in it—my entries in these tend to come out only once in a blue moon these days. I hope to be able to bring the multilingual aspect back to this website at some point—after all, that is the nature of the repertoire I specialize in. So I'm looking forward to this new era with the webs.com domain—and with the new musical challenges that lie ahead. Stay tuned!

Editor's note: As of March 2024 the webs.com URL is dead; the earliest surviving archive of the website, dated May 14, 2013, can be seen here.