About folklore and national issue:
"I'm not declined to direct a student to the citation way of
use of ready examples of folk creativity at all, though this
worldwide known method is also possible. Preservative tendency
in the attitude to the folk music brings to its conservation,
converts it to something constant and frozen, detains its progress
and development, transforms to a museum exhibit. In this matte
as well as in any creative query one cannot excel without exertion
of the fictive initiative, without mobilization of all originative
power of the young composer for serious and thoughtful selection
of the most viable, valuable and progressive essence available
in wide frameworks of national musical art."
"Folklore is accepted to be inexhaustible spring endlessly enabling
to scoop and scoop from. In my opinion this eidolon is poetical,
but not absolutely exact. To make comparison folk music most
probably can be assimilated to oil deposit located in the ground
as a layer being at various depth from the surface of the land.
Yet some 70-80 years ago in Apsheron peninsula it was enough
to dig out a well in some meters, and it was quickly filled
with oil enriching the happy owner. In a pursuit of a profit
people injuriously spent the top layers most accessible to them.
Oil began to leave depthward.
The top layers were exhausted, and now it is possible to extract
it only by means of technical adaptations. It's similarly with
folk music. Let's put on thinking cap: whether we obtain it
too easily, whether we use the top, easily accessible layers
too ruthlessly. Isn't it a high time to think of the really
inexhaustible folk music, which main riches are not only on
a surface, but lie much deeper than we can assume? To reach
them we need arm necessary "technical adaptations", as well.
Operation of the top, easily accessible layers of our music
lead to their overexploitation. The narrow circle of their intonations
and turns wanders from one composition to another one infinitely
repeated without exertion of an active constructive idea and
initiative, consequently depersonalized and reduced to a status
of a stamp."
"Soviet culture", 1962, 29 November
