- This week on our place, our time, a visit with Composer Undine Smith Moore and a performance of her work by the Nova Trio.

Also a look at colonial settlements in Virginia through the eyes of archeologists seeking to preserve them.

Now here's your host, Vianne Webb.

- Thank you for joining us.

We are honored to have as one of our guests, the teacher pianist and composer Undine Smith Moore.

We'll hear music by Dr. Moore and Tim Morton will talk with her in her home.

Undine Smith Moore once remarked that as a child, she was made so aware of her mother's love of reading, that she always felt herself afraid of being caught somewhere without a book.

Reading has certainly served Dr. Moore well in her songs.

She has set poetry by William Blake, John Milton, Michelangelo, and Langston Hughes to many people in Hampton Roads.

Undine Moore is admired as a great teacher at Virginia State University.

She taught for many years before her retirement, and there she established the Black Music Center and invaluable musical and cultural resource.

She has honorary degrees from the University of Indiana and Virginia State and is a Virginia Laureate.

Next August, Undine Moore will be 83 years old.

Tim Morton went to her home in Petersburg to talk with her.

- You grew up in Jarret about 20 miles from here.

What was it like growing up in South Side Virginia before World War - I?

It was splendid.

I hear people, people ask me often in relation to my career as a musician about what it was like to be here, and they ask in a way that suggests that, oh, what a pity.

But the truth of the matter is that though I cannot tell how my life would've been affected if I had heard string quartets and symphonies.

There is a sense in which Petersburg was a fine place in the first instance.

It seemed to me that at least all the citizens, all the people that I had contact with, fought so highly of music.

They all wanted to perform and sometimes you would see perhaps a person walking along the street carrying what was called a music roll, a sort of a heavy cardboard forerunner of an attache case.

And when a person like that pass, the feeling would be, well, this is somebody of substance just scaring his music.

Also, in my assessment of what it was like to grow up here and how it affected the work that I have done, I think that it is very fine to be a part of a community where one's own art is extremely highly regarded and where the community as a whole is interested in your progress.

- You have set several poems by Langton Hughes Music?

Yes.

Did.

Did you know him?

- Yes, I did.

- Tell me about it.

- Well, I do not mean that I knew him in his bosom, but I was a acquainted with him.

He came often here, the lecture at this school.

He was a close friend of Alston Burley, who was at one time the head of the music department here, and I have in my possession some of Langston Hughes personal books.

One which came to me directly and another that came to me through Alston Burley.

- What did Hughes's poems mean to you?

- A feeling that has grown and its significance and its joy over the years.

I have, I am working at the moment on a setting of his poem that is so widely known.

I too, I too am America.

I am the darker brother they send me to eat in the kitchen when I work at this last night, I did, huh?

To think how he could at that time have given expression to so many things, but in this particular, it is I'm not getting on with the work.

'cause you know, if you, if you get too carried away with what you are feeling, you're not gonna be an artist.

But I have to stop when it, when it comes down to then I too, I too, I, I feel I am happy that I can feel so touched at this age.

- You once described yourself as a teacher who composes rather than a composer who teaches, and yet you've composed almost way.

I figure it nearly a hundred works.

- Yeah.

- What makes you compose?

What do you like somebody to ask you to compose things or do you compose just on your own?

- I have always composed, when I was a child, I would not have known to use the word compose, but that is what we had A piano.

Piano and I entertained myself there and that meant improvising and making up music all the time for the pleasure of it so that then of course when I went to fis, I had the formal study that led composition and I, I wrote a good deal of music there as a part of that formal structure - That we are going to hear music by you.

- Yeah.

- On this program, a work for trio, piano, violin and cello that you called Soweto.

- Yes.

- After the township in South Africa.

- That's right - Near Johannesburg.

- Yes.

- Did you think of the title before you wrote it or while you were writing or how did the title come to you and why do you think the title came to you?

- It's hard in the history of the relationships in South Africa, it's hard to pick out one thing because it has all been so horrible and so disturbed.

But there was an occasion when the police and the officials fired in into a group and 22 persons, young people were killed.

What was a crowning insult was the fact that when the people wished to bury the persons that had been murdered, they were not permitted to bury their dead.

And I guess everybody was affected by it and so was I, and I had, I had, I knew I had to do, do this piece, the convention, but I hadn't decided what I was doing.

I was waiting for my subconscious to help me out.

Well, one morning without a word of warning, quite early I heard the word Soweto and I sat up straight up in bed astonished to think, isn't that something what has been going on all the time?

And so I really, I thought that was just, isn't that something?

So I, oh, that's what my piece will be.

And I, of course, it will be many other things and I'm not going to be trying to tell the whole story, but that, that's it.

- With us to perform music by Dr. Moore is the Nova Trio, which commissioned and first performed the work we'll hear.

Dr. Moore composed it less than a year ago.

It confirms that at age 82, she's a lady of remarkable energy.

The music is called Soweto.

After the township in South Africa have always died.

Virginians have always valued their history, but we are risking today losing artifacts from our past, which can return to us valuable lessons.

We're building highways and housing developments over historical sites.

Fortunately, we are identifying and saving some of these.

Don Jeffries visited four places in Hampton Roads where archeologists are learning more about the early years of the colonial settlement in America, - Because this is the area of first settlement in Virginia with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the spread of settlement out from Jamestown throughout Virginia.

We obviously have more archeological and historical sites in this area.

It's an incredibly rich archeological area, - But therein lies a dilemma.

Much of that rich historical treasure is in danger of being bulldozed out of existence, and each site lost slams a door on our colonial heritage.

A particular interest are those 17th century sites, which can add to our meager knowledge of the first a hundred years of settlement.

Following Jamestown, Nicholas Luchetti, senior archeologist with the James River Institute of Archeology explains how cooperative citizens are helping save a few such sites.

- A number of barrel wells were noticed by the landowner.

This is Susan Wescott at Low Tide, and she went down and examined them and in fact, retrieved this late 17th century copper mug from one of the wells.

She in turn notified the state archeologists who determined the significance of the site, and all of that prompted a professional rescue excavation of the church neck Well site, which has proved to be a very significant site because a number of the wells of which there were nine, had parts of shoes, a number of shoes dating to the 17th century, and we think that the site represents a shoemaking tanning industry on the eastern shore during the second half of the 17th century.

Another good example of how the community has helped to save a site that's threatened by development is in the city of Suffolk at a site we call the Woodward Jones site, which is significant because it had the earliest example of a one room house that survived in Virginia, which would've been typical of a larger part of the population than many studies focus on, a lot of archeology, a lot of historical studies focus on, so through the efforts of the landowner, Dr. Lloyd March and the Nan and Suffolk Historical Society, who raised a large amount of money to undertake a proper archeological excavation of the site so that when we're finished, the development can proceed without the loss of any historical or archeological information - Located at the confluence of the Appomattox.

In James Rivers, the old Hopewell Airport is one of the richest archeological sites in Virginia.

The owners of Jordan on the James allowed preliminary excavation of some of the sites prior to construction, but there is still much work to be done - With on this 167 acre point of land as a woodland Indian village.

There is also a major settlement that dates from the earliest period of colonization in Virginia history called a site called Jordan's Journey.

Journey, which was established in 1619.

There is a late 17th century farmstead and a major 18th century plantation at Jordan's Point.

- TI says it will require a decade or longer to acquire the information still hidden in the multiple sites.

At Jordan's point, if a five acre parcel of land containing the three principle sites can be acquired, he will set up research projects, inviting colleges and universities to participate, training archeologists while securing knowledge of our forebearers.

Meanwhile, the association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the A PVA has been protecting our historical heritage since 1889.

One of the most important is Bacon's Castle, the earliest and perhaps the only surviving 17th century house in Virginia.

Nick Luchetti - Through the A PVA in the Garden Club of Virginia, a research excavation was conducted of what has proved to be the only surviving intact garden in 17th century Virginia, and in fact, is the earliest preserved garden plan in North America.

What is so spectacular about it is that the planning beds survive.

There are six large rectangular planning beds in the core of the garden that are about 70 feet wide and almost 98 feet long.

The walkways survive.

White sand walkways, which crisscrossed the garden, are still there, and much to our surprise, garden buildings have, or at least the foundations of these buildings survive on the perimeter of the garden.

And so with all of these sites, we're just accumulating more information and learning about how people lived during the first a hundred years in Virginia.

- The other side of the archeological effort is the preservation and interpretation of artifacts found on the various sites at the James River Institute for Archeology.

That responsibility belongs to Beverly Troub.

- For me, the real excitement and the thrill is working in the lab because for the first time in two, 300 years, you're seeing these objects that were thrown away or lost by someone and it's, it's really exciting to do that.

Terry Barton here is working on some of our artifacts that we have retrieved from the Woodward Jones site.

All the artifacts come in from the field and paper bag with their numbers.

In this case, it's the city of Suffolk, sk, and this is the hundred and 47th site in Suffolk, and the rest of the numbers tell us exactly where on that site.

These artifacts were found after washing.

They're numbered as Terry's doing and mend it together.

Most of the artifacts, the ceramics especially that we find are fragmentary, but in some cases, we're able to mend these fragments together as in this example of a English slip wear dish from one of the church neck wells.

We recovered fragments of a shoe as sketched here, which footwear specialist Al Sto helped us to identify and conserve, and we were able to put the shoe together.

Here it is, it's a child shoe stylistically, it dates to the first quarter of the 17th century, and as far as we know, it is the most complete, earliest excavated shoe found in North America.

This is where we store some of the material from the bland farm stand.

He was occupied from the 17th through the 18th century, as shown by this chronology of wine bottles.

This wine bottle, which dates to the fourth quarter of the 17th century, has a seal of Francis pores on it.

You can see here in fp, he was a statesman, very active in Jamestown in the 17th century.

This is an 18th century bottle.

It bears the seal of Richard Bland, who was very active politically in the activities leading up to the Revolutionary War.

Usually we just find fragments of wine bottles, and we're lucky if we're able to, to mend them together, as in this case, this bottle was pieced together for many fragments.

But occasionally we do find complete bottles as these two are an example of complete bottles, which were found on the floor of the cellar, and they date to the first quarter of the 18th century.

- We like to think that these sites don't belong to the individuals whose property they happen to be on or to the archeologists who happen to excavate them, but they belong to all Virginians because this is a part of their heritage.

Of course, the ultimate goal of all of this work is to present it back to the public.

- A number of independent video producers are plying their trade.

In Hampton Roads Yorktown's, Tim Ivy of I Video Productions is one of them.

We'll leave you now with a look at winter in our place, as seen by Tim Ivy, and hope that you'll join us again next week.