Music

With the 38th Annual Korean Festival happening tomorrow, it’s a good time to highlight Korean indie folk/pop singer-songwriter Fromm.

Last week I cancelled my subscription to the eMusic digital music service, a subscription I paid for faithfully for over ten years. I spent a few years of my blogging life writing about eMusic as a subscriber, so it’s appropriate to mark the end of my subscription with one final post. eMusic has gone through many business models over the years, but at the time I joined it was a would-be solution for people who wanted to listen to lots of music, especially music out of the mainstream, but had only a limited budget to pay for it....

I’m back to posting weekend recommendations, but this time it’s for listening instead of reading. One nice benefit of Spotify and similar services is that you can go back and listen to all those albums you never got around to buying, or sample new music you don‘t yet want to buy—or, if you’re truly a child of the Internet, you may never buy at all but simply listen via audio streams or YouTube....

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker....

I’ve been reading Greg Sandow’s blog posts for a little while, and today checked out his “riffs” on the book he’s writing, Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music. I found the riff on chapter 3 (“The Culture Ran Away From Us”) the most interesting one thus far, because it discusses some of the questions around how the mainstream classical music community (institutions, performers, composers, and audience) has gotten separated from contemporary culture, in a way that other arts have not....