‘The billy-goat failed with fur-coat for grandma’.

-And how did you come to other themes and pieces on folk basis?

-Once Grandma’s Billy-Goat is exclusively folklore theme. I’m sure that no one had raised it before me, and it was hardly heard about. It had come that in Moscow’s Old Arbat I accidentally faced a collection-book by Muzychna Ukraina publishers. There was a whole series of these books: Ukrainian, Russian, and Moldavian folk music – totally were 15 volumes. And there I ‘unearthed’ this melody, it pleased me very much. Though it is similar with many rollicking melodies of our Russian dance songs, such ones under balalaika, but, nevertheless, I saw a kind of a tiny grain. Why many people have been interested in piece Once Grandma’s Billy-Goat, why does it sound freshly? Possibly because that I’ve converted this melody not to merely traditional elaboration – theme with variations, but also rondo, form of three-to-five parts. This form, by my view, corresponded very much to initial text of song:

Later I don’t remember the text verbatim, but by subject the billy-goat convinces the grandma: ‘I’ll kill the wolf there and sew a fur coat to you’. Well, the grandma releases the billy-goat to woods. It is walking across the woods with wish to kill a wolf and to sew a fur coat to grandma:

There seven wolves

Going to meet it.

And the eighth wolf

Is a dampened side.

Dampened for three years

Wishing for goat meat.

Here the billy-goat is telling the seven wolf:

Well, you wolf,

Let us wrestle,

Let us wrestle

And come to accord.

Let us come to accord, not to ‘beat under knee’, but in a proper fashion. And the wolf got offended from this. Not only it got offended, it became angry at all:

Ah, how the angry wolf

Defeated the billy-goat.

Its feet are on the road,

Beard in leaves,

Head in shrubs.

So the billy-goat got nothing with fur coat for the grandma (he laughs). That’s such a satirical text in this song. And I went along this artistic text, along the sense. But few people know about this. How is there ‘Grandma’s billy-goat…’, what is it doing here – question mark.

-And how have you come to theme ‘With Dove, With Grey One’?

-This is a song from wedding rite. I’ve found it in the same Ukrainian collection-book while I had been searching not for ‘common’, for ‘worn-out’ melodies, but for something unknown. Only, unlike the piece Once Grandma’s Billy-Goat, built on one theme, in arrangement of With Dove, With Grey One, quite another form – three-parted one – has come. This is an original musical picture of wedding. The middle of the piece is constructed on my author’s theme.

-Did you have any occasion to listen play of your compatriot, Ivan Yakovlevich Panitsky, during your stay in Balakovo?

-I’m proud that I’m a fellow-countryman of the renowned musician. To the point, once I made inquiries, but I didn’t find the home where he was born, maybe it had been demolished long ago. But musical school No. 3 in a new building, in Balakovo’s New City, bears I. Ya. Panitsky’s name. There’s memorial plaque too. But, unfortunately, he didn’t come to Balakovo at these times.

Unconditionally, later I listened I. Ya. Panitsky, played in my time neither one nor two of his arrangements. Of course, creation by I. Ya. Panitsky’s name couldn’t help to leave a remarkable trace in my soul.

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