- Next on our place, our time, we visit the Chrysler Museum with a musician and listen while we look, we meet a designer who makes clothes that reveal your dreams, and we dig with archeologists uncovering secrets from the past.

Welcome to our place, our time.

I'm Vian Webb.

The search continues for new music director at the Virginia Symphony.

The symphony is at a turning point in its history.

This is the third time in over a decade that the orchestra has chosen a new music director.

Six young conductors were handpicked by a search committee from a field of over a hundred candidates to lead subscription concerts by the orchestra this year.

And the fourth of those candidates conducted last week.

His name is Robert Henderson, and we talked with him at the Chrysler Museum.

As much as the candidates themselves are being tested by the search committee, they are testing the musicians, the management, and the community for the quality and enthusiasm of its support.

Mr.

Henderson wanted to visit another cultural asset in our town, and so Tim Morton went to the museum with him.

- Robert Henderson is the music director of the Arkansas Symphony in Little Rock with Maki's pictures at an exhibition on his program here.

He agreed that a visit to the Chrysler was in order.

We decided to focus our tour on paintings with musical subjects in front of the 16th century Dutch painting concert of Apollo and the Muses.

I began our interview asking Henderson what brought him to Norfolk at this stage of his career.

- I think several things.

One, that the, this orchestra is young.

It's very young.

In fact, I was surprised at the general age level of the musicians.

It's an aggressive group.

I think the management is very good and I think this area is growing quite a bit.

I think the, the future bodes very well for this area in this particular orchestra.

Also, at the moment, it's, I think, the best orchestra that's involved in a search.

- You've been conductor of the Arkansas Symphony in Little Rock for eight years now.

I understand the orchestra's had unparalleled growth while you've been there.

What can you say you've done to promote that growth?

- Yeah, it's kind of curious 'cause that area of the country really underwent its big recession back around 1980 because of the oil glut places like Dallas and Oklahoma and Little Rock and Louisiana all got into trouble then.

Ever since then, some areas have recovered really well and Little Rock is one of them, but also the quality of the orchestra has really improved.

Our ticket sales are way up.

Our budget has doubled in size.

We've added a lot of concerts, and we've become a true state orchestra in which we serve many, many communities in the state, not just in Little Rock.

- What music turns you on?

- Whatever I'm conducting at the moment, or that I'm studying for an upcoming concert, but I'm turned on by many different kinds of orchestral music.

I love the classical period.

I'm sort of specialized in Hayden.

I love contemporary music.

I grew up in Los Angeles when Stravinsky and Sheinberg were still living there.

Plus the bulk of the, the great romantic 19th century works.

- What music do you find difficult to conduct?

- The mo the most difficult music to conduct are the Great Master works, the Beethoven symphonies, the Mozart symphonies and things like that, because they require such care.

They've been done so many times, so many different ways, and it's not a matter of coming up with a new way to conduct a piece, it's just because probably everything new has already been thought of, and that's not the point anyway.

The, the thing that makes them difficult is to make them timely and to make them interesting and make them speak.

Now - You have won awards as a composer.

Tell me about your composing career.

Where do you find time?

And also, I understand you've composed four movies and television.

- Yeah, I did work for a, a long period of time with the Motion Picture Studios in Hollywood and did some composing for various television shows and things like that.

But most of my composing has been for the symphonic genre, and I started very young.

I started when I was in grade school actually composing.

I had a teacher that, that got all her students to compose little things for the piano.

And I just took a few steps further, I guess, and a couple of the pieces that I wrote in high school, which were award-winning compositions.

They, I won A-A-B-M-I award and also a Young Musicians Foundation award for those works.

A couple of those are recorded and published, and one work in particular, a work for unaccompanied trumpet that I wrote is literally played all over the world.

In fact, it was a featured 20th century work in the mu, the Munich Instrumental Competition in 1987, I believe it was, which is a very famous international competition.

- Once you begin looking for paintings with musical subjects at the Chrysler, you find a wide range of them from this Italian Baroque painting by Sebastiano Ricci to this mural sized musical uproar by the American Philip.

Ever good near it is this hot and jazzy bar mural.

Franz Klein painted for a Greenwich Village Tavern.

Henderson and I continuing our prowl pause to talk again in front of Edgar Degas, dancer with bouquets, a music director in the United States has to be far more than a podium conductor.

You've got to be a public relations expert, executive teacher.

Comment on those for me.

And where are your strengths?

- It's really difficult, you know, because they expect such a broad range from one individual, and of course, ultimately the music is the most important thing.

My strengths may be administratively in Learn.

I've had to learn to work with small budgets, how to, how to be creative with rehearsal time and with programming and things to make best use of the resources.

And I think for most of the smaller orchestras, that's very important.

And with the people skills, I'm, I'm not the kind of person that can go out and ask for the money, but I can do the setup.

I can talk to them about, you know, what music will do for the community, how important it is.

But then I want a board member to come in behind me to actually say, now this is what we want you to write on the check.

- Describe for me your philosophy of programming both for a season and for a concert.

- First of all, I think you need as much variety as possible because symphonic music has a large range.

You have to have the masterpieces on a program or the audience won't come.

They want to hear the familiar, but we also have a real responsibility, and to me, a, a desire anyway to program new works.

The, the parable I think that I can relate this to best is, is like fishing.

You know, when you want to catch a fish for dinner first on the hook, you gotta put what the fish likes.

So you get that on the hook.

Once you reel 'em in, then you can cook 'em any way you want.

- Let's find out something about you personally.

Do you have any hobbies?

- Yeah, this, I don't talk about this one much because people think it's so bizarre, but my basic hobby is mountain climbing, rock climb and ice climb and, and generally do alpine peaks in the United States.

Alaska, I've climbed in Japan and Europe and a few other places.

For me, it's a thing getting outside because there's so much study involved in, in being a conductor so much inside work.

I love to be outdoors.

I love doing something physical.

And also in climbing there are great challenges, great personal challenges.

It tells you a lot about yourself.

- Henderson from all reports made a good impression here.

The race for the Virginia Symphony job is going to be a tight one.

- Marilyn Butler is a quilter and a clothes designer who lives in Virginia Beach.

But her quilts don't just lie on a bed.

They hang in offices and art galleries and even on walls in the Soviet Union.

And for her clothes, Butler chooses colors, fabrics, and designs intending to make the wearer feel good as well as look good.

Mike Sinclair tells us about an artist who with everyday materials makes what she calls dream coats.

- Merri Butler's art hangs in cities around the world from Odessa in the Soviet Union to Virginia Beach's sister City Moss Norway.

This local artist uses her images to create healing and peace on a personal and global scale.

The death of her husband in 1983 brought Butler to Virginia Beach and changed the direction of her life and her art.

- When my husband died and I moved to Virginia Beach, I noticed when I was unpacking and kind of touching the fabrics and working with them, it felt very healing to me.

And it felt like it was a way to work through my grieving process.

And so the more I worked with the fabrics, the better I felt.

And I began to realize that I was experiencing some healing through that.

- Butler began sewing when she was 12, but her artistic training was in the graphic arts.

Before becoming a fiber artist, butler worked in traditional realism, painting still life's landscapes and portraits.

A - Foundation in traditional realism really helped me know how to draw and how to work with color.

And that's basically what I'm doing with, with my fiber art.

Now, I don't like the impressionists.

They had that same kind of loose quality, but those, the Impressionists learned very fundamental drawing and painting.

First, you really need to know the basics before you can jump off on something that's skillfully contemporary looking.

- The project which has garnered Butler the most attention is the US Soviet Children's Peace Quilt Exchange Butler helped students at a Virginia Beach Elementary School and a school in the Soviet Union create an exchange.

Quilts made up of symbols for peace.

The idea for creating the quilt began when Butler traveled to the Soviet Union as a citizen diplomat.

In 1987, - When I realized that I could facilitate some of my own personal healing through colors and symbols, I started to wonder, couldn't I do that somehow on a global level?

And when I heard about young storytellers for peace, taking quilted banners on a storytelling tour of the Soviet Union, I donated my Rainbow Bridge to Peace banner, which shows the US and the Soviet Union connected by a rainbow.

I went into my daughter's sixth grade school at Lakehorn and talk to the kids and the teachers about using art and symbols for peace.

And then I encouraged them all to draw their own symbols of peace onto fabric.

Later, I sewed that fabric into a quilt and brought it to the Soviet Union as a gift to school.

One 19 in Odessa in the Ukraine.

And it was very well received there.

And while I was there, I taught the Soviet children the same process and brought their quilt back.

- Butler raised all of the funds for her trips herself, receiving financial support from many local businesses and individuals interested in contributing to peace.

Her ability to personally take the quilt from Virginia Beach to the Soviet Union ensured that she could bring back the Soviet quilt and the peace messages from the Soviet students.

- They said things to me like, I want you to tell the American kids that we want peace too and let's, let's have all the kids stick together and tell the grownups, let's tell the grownups we want peace.

They were feeling disempowered.

Also, they were feeling like small people in a grownup's world.

And if the, if the grownups choose to blow themselves up, what could they do?

And this was a chance that they felt like they could do something.

And it was a voice kind of crying out in the dark grownups we went.

Peace.

- Now that the chill of the Cold War has eased, Butler is focusing her attention on the Middle East.

- I feel like what anybody can do for the Middle East is only their own little portion of what they do best.

And since mine is colors and symbols, I'm designing a quilt right now that uses an Islamic design and through the juxtapositions of colors and mostly a rainbow color design gives a sense of healing - Butler's quilt designs to not all aspire to world peace.

She has begun creating wall hanging.

She calls guardian angel quilts.

Butler primarily works alone.

However, the demand for these quilts is such that she is helped by her assistance.

Clara Varga and Elena Goodheart.

- My idea for guardian angel quilts came from actually a contest that I got too busy to enter.

It was called Memories of Childhood.

And my idea was to do a guardian angel and I got busy with commissions and never got to to do it.

And it's funny, the winning one was a quilt about all the scary monsters in the basement.

And I thought to myself, see, I wish I had done a more positive looking quilt than that 'cause I think I would've won.

So as a result of something that I didn't get around to doing, I developed guardian angel quilts that people tell me they feel real good when they look at these.

I had one mother tell me that she bought one for her daughter.

Her daughter was plagued with fear of the dark and nightmares after she was sexually molested.

And the mother told me that after she hung the angel up, the little girl's nightmares in fear of the dark went away.

- Butler also creates her own fashion designs.

She calls them dream coats.

The coats are a sort of wearable art, which were influenced by a trip to a New York theater.

- I saw Joseph in the amazing Technicolor Dream coat on Broadway, and he was wearing a jacket with all his dream images on it.

It was fabulous.

It was silk and satin and velvet.

And I thought, I want my dream image on a jacket like that too.

So, but I didn't know how to quilt.

So I went back home and luckily enough, in the two weeks I was gone, a quilt shop opened two blocks from me, and their first class they were teaching was how to do a quilt jacket.

- It takes six to eight weeks to make a coat.

They are individually designed to reflect the dreams and personality of the owner.

Each code includes symbols, which holds some importance like this design for local actress Elizabeth McDowell.

- The eagle and the dolphins are particularly appealing to me.

They're symbols that I've used that have appeared in my dreams and are generally important to me.

- I work usually seven days a week.

It's all because I love it.

And I, that's exciting.

I mean, that's a good thing for a person to feel like they're excited about the work that they do.

Joseph Campbell says, follow your bliss.

And it's, it's been challenging sometimes to do that, but I've kept that in mind for years.

- The Peace quilts by Marilyn Butler will be on display at the Crest Star Bank building in downtown Norfolk through March the ninth.

Two years ago on our place, our time, we presented a group of women from Fredericksburg who made a distinctively original music and did it in their own unique style Sapphire or the uppity blues Women have now been recognized nationally since we first presented them.

They've signed a recording contract with alligator records and release their second album.

They've been given the WC Handy Award for blues performance, and they've been recognized by Downbeat Magazine as a musical group to watch.

We are pleased to watch them.

Now.

Here are Sapphire, the uppity blues women.

- A big old rough well, he's a big old to rough of well, at night he's chasing and hes around sleeping all day.

He a ruffo Tom is all shoot up and well, he's a ruffo Tom all shoot up.

And because he is always stalking in The's yard where his whiskers are broken and his ears are offshoot, but his lovingly been tre to the bottoms of my shoes when he rubbed up against me.

I don't know what to say.

I'm just as little kid always his way.

My baby's a tough tom.

His speed.

Well, he's a tough tom van.

His speed, the sunshine, well, his whiskers all broken and it ears are al true.

His loving leaves me trembling to the bottoms of my shoes when he rubs up against me.

I don't know what to say.

I'm just this little kit always his way.

A tough old Tom Cat lands on his speed, ready falls.

Well, he a tough on his, he falls, then he lays in his, then he lays in the sunshine and licking his claws - Along the banks of the James River.

Rapid development is both revealing and threatening his historical sight from America's shadowy 17th century long lost settlements are coming to light as builders clear land for golf courses and for subdivisions.

Archeologists are racing the bulldozer as they seek the secrets of those sites.

And their findings are challenging.

What we know about early American life, about its architecture and about its material culture, contributing producer Mary Kay Sizemore, brings us up to date on what we are learning about our past.

- They must have had a terrible feeling down here in the pit of their stomachs to get off the boat and see Captain Newport sail back to England knowing that the chances of you ever getting a return ticket were negligible.

It just, it, it would be like going to the moon on a one way trip.

- Right now, the there is a spur of development in Chesapeake area, which is the earliest settled area.

And that in turn puts a greater degree of urgency on rescuing these sites because their construction can erase them without a trace from the ground.

What we're gonna get will be what we get in the next few years.

- Archeologists, historians, developers, and citizens have joined in recent months to form a new Virginia company named for the group of investors that founded and governed the first English colony in America at Jamestown.

Born of fear that Virginia's undiscovered 17th century sites would be wiped out by development long before Jamestown celebrates its 400th anniversary in just 16 years, the new nonprofit doesn't seek to stop development just to delay it long enough to scoop historic treasures from the soil.

- One of the forces that drives us most is the fact that once an archeological site is lost, it's lost forever.

There is no way to recapture that information.

And so that provides us with a sense of urgency, especially during these times of, of major growth, to try and save these sites for which there is either no protection through federal legislation or no funding, the sites that fall through the cracks.

And in many cases, those have proved to be among the most important that have come to light.

In Virginia.

- The traces, the earliest settlers left are merely stains in the ground, discarded tools, broken weapons, bits of ceramic, and their own remains to the untrained observer.

They're almost invisible.

One reason why these sites are so fragile and subject to destruction, but to social historians like Carrie Carson of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, these traces and artifacts offer important evidence of how life was lived in Virginia's earliest colonial period.

- When I was learning history as a kid, the history of Virginia started with people who were profoundly unlike New Englanders.

They were gentlemen, they were ladies and gentlemen.

They came to Virginia, they profited from their cultivation of tobacco, and they built large brick houses such as those that we saw when we toured Virginia.

No one knew, or at least the popular history lover didn't know.

Certainly kids reading history books didn't know that Virginia was mostly settled by dirt farmers, men and women who built little wooden houses such as the Virginia Company, colonial Williamsburg, the Park Service and others have only begun to find in the last couple of decades - At a new development governors land at Two Rivers where the Chi hominy joins the James River recent excavations underscore the importance of archeological investigation before the bulldozers begin.

Right in the middle of the golf course was a large 17th century site with post hold buildings a well and several graves archeologists uncovered 17th century weapons, a heart shaped lock and a sword hilt.

Reminders that early Virginia was very different from the 18th century Virginia.

We're familiar with.

For Angus Murdoch, longtime director of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the group that originally preserved Jamestown, the 17th century, has always had a unique charm.

- The 17th century is a very special place in in, in the historical context.

It is not the 18th century, it is not the age of the Enlightenment.

It in many ways is a direct transfer of the age of Shakespeare and the language of the King James version of the the Bible into a new world setting.

The Virginia Company is so important as an institution or as a new vehicle for research because the archeological record is perhaps the most tangible way we can reconstruct the gaps.

We can fill in the missing pages, in the history books.

Someone on the scene in 16 seven or 1620 can be lying.

A lot of the, the literature from that period is propaganda, travel promotion, travel literature.

But the artifacts that they left behind do not lie.

And the challenge for us is A, to find them before they're destroyed by development, and B, to interpret them and bring them to life again.

- That quest is not simply an academic one for archeologist.

Iver Noel Hume of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

The past always wears a human face.

- Finding things is about people you are reaching out to the past.

I mean, that's object in the ground.

Nobody has touched it from the day that it was put there to the day that you find it.

If you can't feel any sense of bridge of time and concern about how it got there and what the kind of person is you are meeting across the time, if you don't feel that you don't really have any heart for archeology.

And archeology isn't about collecting artifacts and putting them through a computer, the object is to introduce the people of today to the people of the past.

- Next week on our place, our time will profile some historical researchers of a different sort.

Three singer musicians who met while performing 18th century music in Colonial Williamsburg.

Taverns are now trying to develop a national audience for their act.

And in downtown Norfolk, there's an historic theater that was designed, built, and paid for by blacks.

We'll tell you about the efforts to save and restore it.

And then we'll profile sculptor Linda Gson, a nationally recognized artist with a muse of fire.

I'm Vian Webb.

We certainly hope you'll join us next week for our place our time, partial funding for our place, our Times Made possible by grants from the Arts Commissions of the cities of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.

From the Virginia Commission for the Arts and from the Arts Commissions of the cities of Newport News, Norfolk Hampton, and Williamsburg.