Partial funding for the production of Our Place Our Time is made possible by a grant from the Allison Jay and LOW Parsons Foundation.

Next on Our Place Our Time, we'll meet an award-winning farmer who brings in the harvest we celebrate this time of year and will slow down to look at some artwork that we pass almost every day.

We'll also profile a local composer who writes serious music that musicians love to play.

Welcome to Our Place Our Time, the cultural magazine program for Hampton Roads.

I'm Vian Webb.

The turkey and vegetables that we enjoy at our Thanksgiving dinner are raised and grown on farms across this country.

Now, yes, that's an obvious thing to say and perhaps you might think it's hardly worth saying.

And yet in this day and age, most of us live in cities and suburbs and the closest we ever get to a farm is our local supermarket.

Why I know children who believe that old food comes in either frozen or cellophane packages.

We sometimes forget that it's the farmer, the ever diminishing part of our population that plants and grows and raises the food we eat.

And so we though this an appropriate occasion to visit a farm.

Producer Tim Morton tells us the story of a national award-winning farmer.

We mold board plowed the ground back in the late spring.

And Now we're presently planting soybeans and the brand we're planting is a 9442.

It's a group four soybeans.

This bean has been doing real good for us.

About three years ago was the first time we planted what we call a group four bean, which is an earlier bean for this area.

And you harvest it in late September, early October.

They let you get it off early if you need to plant wheat or something like that in behind it, you're able to go in.

But the main reason that I'm going to soybean is because of the job that's been doing for us here on our land.

Last year the beans in 1989 I believe, those early beans averaged about 62 bushels to the acre.

Last year we done a little better.

We had a three acre plot that we harvested and entered in the state soybean contest and they yielded about 65 bushels to the acre.

We come in second place, which was a good yield for this area.

You've got to have the best yield possible to make the profit.

That's bottom line is what you get, what you carry home to the bank I guess they say.

Ronnie Russell manages Corbin Hall Farm north of Saluda in Middlesex County about five miles off US Route 17.

You turn east near Farm View.

On 1500 acres, Russell grows the staple Eastern Virginia crops, soybeans, corn and red winter wheat.

When they hold an agricultural field day in Middlesex County and invite the governor and secretary of agriculture, many summers it's at Corbin Hall Farm.

A few things here remind you that some of this land has been in farm production for more than three centuries, but mostly this is a modernized operation.

Three people do the work.

I was born in Norfolk County in a little area called St.

Brides.

In 1959 Norfolk City bought quite a bit of farmland in that area and they bought the farm that Mr.

Rufus Harold owned there that my father was presently farming at the time and my grand-grandfather with him.

So in 1960, Mr.

Harold purchased this farm.

He bought two farms, on King William County next to the Pomonkey Indian Reservation.

And my father and grandfather looked at both places and he said, "You can have your choice.

Either farm you'd like to work."

So they liked this area and they chose this one.

And I was about 13 years old at the time when we moved here.

And it was 500 acres open land on the place and Mr.

Harold started clearing new ground.

And every summer, I think from 1960 to about I guess 67 or 68, I spent my summer picking up roots and we done it the old fashioned way.

We used our hands.

So he had bulldozers, but we had to get out and pick up the roots.

Russell splits the income from Corbin Hall Farm with Rufus Harrell.

Russell gets one third of the gross.

He owns half of the farm's equipment.

He owns his house in which he lives with a wife and daughter and has acquired now some land of his own.

Going out of business.

You've been out here some years now and one of the recent things that's begun to happen is the interest of the environmental movement in what you do as a farmer and what you put in the water that's, as you say, three quarters around here.

What do you do?

For a number of years now, we've been planting some filter strips around the edge of the creeks and just to try and filter out the silt and any chemicals that might leach out into the waterway.

We split our applications of nitrogen.

We do that so that the plant can take up the nitrogen in different stages rather than just dumping it all on the ground at one time.

And we feel that if we put it out in stages the plant will take up more.

You have less chance of getting a big rain and leaching it down into the soil.

And we're, we're trying to use less insecticides.

The last several years I haven't used any insecticide on my corn.

We stopped using it and so far we've been getting by with it.

We're losing a few hills to the acre, but not enough to make any difference yet a while.

You have won awards as a soybean farmer and of course as a wheat farmer.

What do you attribute your success to?

Why, why do you win these?

Well I don't really think we're doing that much different from anybody else.

We just try to be efficient.

We try to plan on time.

See that the weeds don't take the crop.

We cultivate on time.

And just, just good basic farming practices is what we try and do here.

Russell likes to try new crops.

This past summer he planted and grew elephant garlic.

He got the idea at a seminar and an Oregon farmer who wanted to learn how elephant garlic would grow in this area contracted with him.

Garlic ice cream?

Yes sir.

Garlic ice cream is a big thing.

It's kind of hard to believe what garlic ice cream would taste like.

I'm not sure.

I never tried it myself.

But they use it for a variety of dishes and they use it in breads and cakes and just all kinds of stuff when you have this garlic festival.

With Middlesex County agent W.D.

Edwards, Russell inspected an experimental field of canola he planted.

A source for vegetable oil, low in cholesterol and saturated fats.

Canola is grown extensively in the Midwest and Canada.

Russell was hoping it might prove to be a supplement crop, but his canola came up thin and diseased as did the crops of several other farmers.

Russell does supplement his operation with a small herd of Angus and Herefords.

A volunteer fireman, Russell on occasion, has captained the Upper Middlesex Fire and Rescue Squad.

A religious man, he is chairman of the Hermitage Baptist Church Board of Deacons.

They grew 82 bushel wheat last year for a 45 bushel yield difference.

It was for his soft red winter wheat that Russell won a national award.

His harvest per acre in 1990 was more than double the Middlesex County five year average.

County Agent Edwards was the local liaison in the national competition.

You worked with Ronnie Russell in the wheat challenge.

What, what was it you did?

Well, I really didn't do a whole lot because Ronnie's the one that did it.

Ronnie just did everything on his, the contest that he was in last year on wheat.

Ronnie planted on time.

He planted the right amount of seed per acre or we call it now per foot of row.

Ronnie used a good variety.

He had his fertility right.

He split his application of, of M, nitrogen.

He all his timing was right.

I really didn't do anything except just look at it.

There's an irony to the story.

The national wheat competition was sponsored by Tilt Fungicide Company, but with no heavy mildew on his wheat.

Russell decided he didn't need the fungicide and not using it disqualified him from winning a free trip to Europe.

But I think bottom line if you need it, use it.

If you don't, we don't need to be putting it out there.

This year the situation was I did need it and I did apply it.

Because of the mildew resulting from the warm winter, Russell's wheat harvest last June didn't have as high a yield as he had in the prize winning year.

The best he got was 79 bushels per acre as compared to 82 bushels in 1990.

Flour from soft red winter wheat is used to make cakes, pastries and biscuits.

Russell's wheat will likely be shipped from Norfolk to Eastern Europe and Russia or to the Middle East.

Country life has always been known to be a good life, but I feel that being a farmer, we're very close to the land and, and to the Lord.

And you know farming, you can do all that you want.

You can do everything right.

You can use the right seed, you can till your soil, you plant your seeds, you cultivate it.

But there's one thing left and the good Lord has to take care of the rest of it.

And we're, we're so close to the Lord.

The rain the season, that's what counts.

And it's important.

I think it's important to look to the Lord and give him the glory and the credit for it.

From the farm, we return to the city to take a look at billboards.

We pass them every day.

Some people just take them for granted.

Their information whizzing by on the way from here to there.

Other people think that they're an eyesore indeed a blot on the landscape.

But to Robert Landau, they are possibilities for art.

A mirror of our culture.

Producer Holly O'Neill visited Landau and they stopped to view an exhibit of billboard art in Virginia Beach.

Billboards create a common experience shared among people everywhere.

Whether you're driving through a city or on a highway or walking, billboards are often readily available and ready to send you messages.

It is just how those messages are received that varies among people.

I think ugly, ugly, ugly.

PetBridges is an active member of the Virginia Beach Anti-Billboard Partnership.

His group petitioned city council to restrict billboards.

Members of the group were recently at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts passing out anti-billboard material because of its billboard art show now on display.

I think it's unfortunate that there's an implied blessing of billboards by virtue of, of having a billboard art exhibit.

Bridges has not yet seen the exhibit.

Billboard art is a compilation of 36 photographs.

The show includes an historical survey of billboards, billboards seen as art forms and urban landscape photographer Robert Landau's unique perspective on billboards and their surroundings.

What I've done there is sort of used billboards as almost as like pieces of collages.

Taken the sort of the original message of the billboard and by photographing them in juxtaposition with the environment or just by focusing on a portion of the billboard, have sort of created new messages that weren't originally intended by the billboards.

The statement sometimes is just the sort of surreal kind of juxtapositions that exist in a city when you have different elements kind of colliding and competing for attention.

I've got one picture of a man's head with these huge ears and behind him is a palm tree kind of sprouting out of his head and you get these kind of odd things that create these unintended statements.

In reviewing billboards as an art form from the 1950s through the '80s decade, pop art, psychedelic art and photorealistic trends are included in the show.

Pop art is basically borrowed from the billboard painting style and the artists refine it and then the commercial artists take it back and put it back into the billboards and so I think, you know, there is a lot of sort of cross-pollination.

A native of Los Angeles, Landau finds a wealth of subject matter on the city's famed sunset strip.

Landau looks at billboards as an interesting way to examine our culture.

These black and white photographs chronicle the medium's development from the turn of the century poster wagon through the Depression, the war efforts, up to the 1950s political billboards.

Here, this classic picture taken by Margaret Bork White of Louisiana flood victims during the Depression.

This dim realistic scene so inconsistent with the billboard's portrayal of the American way.

They are certainly artifacts.

They say a lot about what's going on in culture.

They kind of mirror the, the trends of what's going on in politics and fashion and entertainment.

So in that sense they're, I think they, they say a lot about our culture.

If somebody asked me if billboards are art, I'd say no, but I'd say the same thing again about film and television.

They're only art if an artist does them.

I think there are places where billboards do and don't belong.

You know, I, I really, in my opinion, they're really sort of a city thing.

They're part of the clutter of a city.

Gardner King, the general manager of Adam's outdoor advertising company agrees.

Has a proper place.

Billboards don't belong in some places.

In a commercial environment they belong as just as rightfully as any other piece of commercial property.

Do you think billboards are art?

Yes I do.

I think some billboards are, are ugly.

I think that it's a commitment of the new part of the outdoor industry that is being innovative in their art design.

I think some messages can be ugly if they don't have any life or if they don't have any color or if they don't have any thought behind them.

I think it takes a great art department and a great desire to develop total creativity to stimulate somebody's imagination.

King also wants to stimulate people to see the billboard art exhibit at the center.

The company plans to donate about eight billboards to promote the exhibit.

Some billboards will be recreations from Landau's exhibit and some have been chosen from local artists work.

I think it's really exciting for any visual artist to be able to have the opportunity to have your work blown up that large.

I'm real excited about it.

Virginia Beach artist Vicki Bruner's painting was selected to become a billboard.

She believes these billboards, unlike most, will fit the term billboard art.

They're pieces of art, pieces of work instead of the tacky lettering and gauty colors that you get on so many billboards.

I think some people are going to find them offensive and are not going to improve of them at all.

And I think some people are absolutely going to love it.

The billboards are scheduled to pop up around town in the beginning of December.

Billboard art can be seen at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts through January the 12th.

Adolphus Hailstork writes classical music.

It's music that crosses social barriers and musical genres.

Born in Albany, New York Hailstork's list of his teachers reads like a who's who of the eminent musical teachers of our time.

Dr.

Hailstork himself teaches music at Norfolk State University and his music compositions are being played by orchestras throughout this country.

A final distinguishing mark about Adolphus Hailstork is that he writes music that musicians like to play and that audiences like to hear.

Mike Sinclair produced this profile.

Adolphus Hailstork has been composing since he was in high school.

He has earned commissions from groups as diverse as JC Penney in the Harlem Boys Choir and has heard his work performed around the country.

Many of his works reflect the local area such as this march performed by the Tidewater Winds entitled Norfolk Pride.

Composers sometimes really start hitting their stride after about 30 years in the business and I'm now on my 34th and I've been on a roll for the past year.

Just each, each piece is, is, is turning up so confidently.

I mean just with a high degree of energy, high degree of skill.

Dividing his time between his classes at Norfolk State and the magnet school, Hale Dork shares his expertise with his students.

Teaching is a task he finds rewarding, satisfying and a necessity.

Yes, that's a nice court selection.

I especially like the way you moved your base in a nice melodic way.

There are very few composers in America who can make the living solely off composing music, especially if you're working in the concert tradition, symphonic tradition.

If I were a commercial composer and I wrote for the pop world recordings and for films, then I could do that.

But since I've chosen the more austere and less lucrative field of the concert hall, I've got to find some way of feeding myself and teaching does that.

Hailstork's music crosses through a broad spectrum of styles and techniques.

His work is so diverse it's difficult to characterize the Hailstork style.

I happen to write a music which you know, as, as, as Mark Mobley says is rather conservative and, and certainly is quite accessible.

And I think that does have a lot to do with it.

The thing I, one of the things I'm proudest of is that especially here in Hampton Roads area, is that I'm managing to reach out to people of divergent cultures and so that I have strong support among the African American community in this area as well as being respected and apreciated by the dominant culture in this area also.

So I'm very pleased with that.

In one piece you may have a very strong sense of the church or in a very simple kind of church harmonies.

And then in another piece you'll have fragments of a spiritual, but more likely you'll have both of them in the same piece in differing, different degrees.

There's also elements of jazz.

Lots of rhythmic flexibility.

He has a very strong sense of rhythm.

I think that adds to the, that adds to the drama.

Recently Hailstork held a concert of his original works at Virginia Wesleyan College.

Pianist Lee Jordan Anders is a faculty member at Virginia Wesleyan and helped organize the concert.

She is very familiar with the intricacies and difficulties of performing a Hailstork piece.

Two areas that are problematic for me is making the inherent dissonances in any bit of contemporary music become consonant to our ear.

When we play a Beethoven Sonata, well we might... That whole idea is one C minor tryad.

No problem.

One though, how many notes did I play?

Maybe 10?

But of those 10 notes, I only have to think about one thing.

C minor triad.

Not so in contemporary music.

When I play this sound, I have to think about for that, just that one sound, I have to think about four or five different things because this is not an identifiable entity.

Clarinet is Gerard Arante is on faculty at Norfolk State University and commissioned Hailstork to create a piece for clarinet and piano entitled A Simple Caprice.

I always want music that that I like playing.

And we did a concert here at Virginia Wesleyan actually earlier this well at the end of last season.

And it was thrilling.

I mean it was just, it was the opening piece on the concert and there was just such a wonderful energy about it.

Hailstruck writes for the concert hall and his music holds an appeal that cuts across racial and social boundaries.

I had a composition premiered at Bank Street Baptist Church in November and it had a passage in it that goes... Now that comes out of African American choral music.

But in March at Virginia Wesleyan College, I had an audience which was predominantly white audience and I introduced them to something that I don't think would've worked in Bank Street, which is a piece in 12 tone technique like that.

Okay, complete different styles.

But in this case I selected my program so that it was tailored towards the particular ethnic makeup of those audiences.

And that, that is deliberate.

A composition is never finished until it is performed.

For a composer, the difficulty lies in finding a way to be heard.

Helstork is recording some of his work with the Virginia Pro Music to be included on a compact disc.

I don't have any problem with it.

I don't either.

Okay.

Onward.

Most composers I believe will write just for the opportunity of the performance.

Someone says, you know, if someone walked up to me today and said we'd like to do an orchestra piece of yours, but we don't have a good deal of money but we could pay for getting the parts reproduced or something.

Would you write it?

The answer is yes, because I want to increase my portfolio holdings of of orchestra music.

So it's, it's not, it's not the money.

It's the opportunity for performance that really makes it.

I think it's important to realize just how important he is to the community here.

Because traditionally most classical music audiences tend to think of orchestra music and chamber music as something made by dead European white guys.

And here is Adolphus Hailstork who has none of those things except a guy.

But his music can serve as a bridge because he's absorbed all those traditional elements.

In make it serve as a bridge from the old music to the new music.

We all have our own ways of, of responding to the world.

More, some people are more visual, some people more oral.

For me it was music.

Now music has, especially concert music, has an inherent drama to it.

That is perhaps the most consistent characteristic of my music is drama.

And I, I love making this drama come alive onto my pencil and the music takes shape and grows and until you get to, you know, the puration and the Denomon.

It's just like writing a novel or something.

So I, I like I, I love that.

It's it's an exciting way of life.

Since we first aired that story, Adolpha's hailstork has been asked by the Barlow Commission of Salt Lake City to compose a work for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

His compositions have been played recently by the Chicago and the Detroit Symphony Orchestras.

And next spring you can hear work of his sung by the Virginia Pro Musica.

Next week on Our Place Our Time, we're going to uncover one of Norfolk's best kept secrets.

Then we'll see an exhibit by perhaps the greatest Civil War photographer, but it's not who you think.

And then we'll have a talk with Ken Burns, the producer of the PBS documentary, The Civil War.

I'm Vian Webb.

We hope you'll join us next week for Our Place Our Time.

Partial funding for Our Place, Our Time has been made possible by the Arts Commission of the City of Chesapeake with additional support from the Arts Commissions of the Cities of Virginia Beach, Newport News, Norfolk, Hampton and Williamsburg.

Partial funding for the production of Our Place Our Time is made possible by a grant from the Allison Jay and LLW Parsons Foundation.