A new window to Pittsburgh's musical past

This lies dangerously close to self-promotion but I wanted to make you aware of a neat development here at the P-G. While we are by no means the first, we have recently joined Google's archive search for newspapers and makes for fun reading about the music scene here years ago.

Go to Google's News Archive page  and search for something specific, such as Pittsburgh Symphony and a conductor or a composer (like Steinberg and Syria and Mahler) and you can view a digital scan of Post-Gazette articles containing those words. Also, try the advance search.

Prior to this service, you had to look at, ugh, microfiche, to see this stuff. This technology is amazing. It somehow recognizes text that is scanned in. Other papers will pop up in the search, but they (NY Times, you know who you are!) ask for outrageous fees for viewing an article. As of now, the P-G ones are free. I had a ton of fun looking at old papers. It is so strange seeing a now lionized name like Menuhin simply reported on because he was just starting out his career.