Googling Life As We (may not) Know It
Google‘s latest coup is the digitization and online offering of essentially the entire photo archive of Life magazine. They’re currently up to around 20% of the entire ten-million picture archive, so there’s lots more to keep looking for in the future. Of course you can search to your heart’s content for just about any subject matter; but a quick search for “composer” returns some really truly spiffy photos of various and sundry greats (and a few “who dat?”‘s), many I’ve never seen before and all wonderful images… Like this one, from 1955, of Alan Hovhaness buried in his work. The images on Google are all much larger than this, and quite vivid.
That’s a great photo of composer Alan Hovhaness – someone whose music our college wind band played many times. The above photo bares out what many of the recordings claim, that he almost a thousand works and was always buried in his work. Strange he’s not better known? In addition to the LIFE photos, I found a great Hovhaness gallery at the following website:
http://www.hovhaness.com/Gallery_00.html
Found the Frank Grandstaff story:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,800919,00.html
A colleague of mine points out that the result of entering the search criterion “millscollege” into the Life archives produces several photographs of Harry Partch working with his various invented instruments. A remarkable collection!
Does anybody know what the story is of Composer and Convict Frank M. Grandstaff is?