...born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1941, three and a half months before the German-Soviet war, in a family of medical students.

My mother Maria Galembo was talented with poetry, singing, and active in amateur theater. She was a well liked kind and very beautiful young lady.

My father Semion Galembo (1918-2001) had lost his parents very early so he was an absolutely self-made person. Although he had no musical education and no idea about how to read music notation, he had earned money from his school times by his musical talent. He had a fantastic musical ear and memory. He played piano, guitar and accordion by heart, and was the only person in the town who could do what he did. In those times dancing and song music usually came from cinema, however, no scores were available. But competing orchestras wanted to play the modern and fashionable music as soon as possible. My father was the person who was hired by educated musicians to go to a new film and to play back by heart the film music. Educated musicians wrote scores directly from his playing, then modified them for orchestra.

...Dnepropetrovsk was bombed in the first weeks of the war, and our family was forced to evacuate. Really, in these first days of the war people did not know how long the war would continue - may be the glorious Soviet Army from day to day will stop aggressors etc. - so people were resistant to the idea of leaving their homes behind to move on to uncertainty. One fellow from my mother's student group, who was known to like her, advised her confidently: you should evacuate, you are a Jew, and fascists are killing Jews! It was the final push for my mother's decision to evacuate... When she returned to Dnepropetrovsk to finish her study after the war, she was told that this friend, who advised her to leave, was working here for Germans and was covertly looking for hidden Jews...

The evacuation was ugly and cruel. In the train we rode in a dirty goods wagon, without any medical service and scarce amounts of food. We were moving towards Siberia over many weeks. The train was bombed several times. My mother had got mastitis and could not feed me. Mastitis grew into blood infection and on one of the stations my mother fell unconscious. As it was not the station where we were officially prescribed to stop, my mother was refused medical help - it was the usual cruel order of these days. Only after my grandmother informed medical doctors that my mother was their colleague was she brought to a hospital - they had a deficiency of personnel. After recovering, my mother was working in this hospital during the rest of the war.

My father had returned from the war with a trophy: accordion. As he continued to serve as an army medical officer, we had been living in small military communities with no musical schools around. I learned to play the accordion by heart instead.

I wanted to study guitar in the same way, but there was no guitar available, so I spent much time calculating on paper how I would transfer the chords I knew from the accordion to the phantom guitar. So, when I first had the opportunity to pick up a guitar years later, I really knew what to do with it. These "guitar chords calculations" were my first experience in mathematical approaches to musical problems. When I was 14, I had touched a piano for the first time - I found it in the Military Officers Club, and I immediately began insistent attempts to play it.

As I was not prepared to higher musical education, but was excellent in physics and mathematics in high school, I decided to enter the Physics Department of Leningrad University (1959) to study acoustics, the closest natural science to music. Like my father, I obtained a financial support for my studentship from playing music - I performed jazz and pop music in amateur orchestras for many years, my musical life gave me much information, lot of interesting contacts, although it was not always easy. I was the only student of this university with Musical Acoustics in the diploma subject list. My studies were largely self-directed (musical acoustics was absent in the university program) and I insisted my Professor Georgy Ostroumov (who was an expert in non-linear acoustics, but recalled with warmth how he calculated a piano soundboard' vibrations before the war) to examine me.
To find a job in musical acoustics, I located and visited, during my late undergraduate studentship, all the Russian scientists known to have a previous experience in Musical acoustics - it was an exciting meeting such monsters of musical acoustics like Theremin, Volodin, Rimski-Korsakov, Rivin, Rzhevkin and others. All of them to this time had left musical acoustics (except rather old genius Theremin, who was working really for himself in a musical museum) since no financial support was available. Instead they had turned to underwater acoustics and could not really help with recommendations for the type of job I wanted.

My diploma work (1965) was devoted to piano hammers nonlinearity, and was more experimental than theoretical, because I did it for the Leningrad piano factory (named "Red October" - sounds strange for those who do not know the specificity of the Soviet life). The acoustical lab of the factory, organized just two years before my diploma work, became a place of my work for many years. My gift to the lab when I came there was a huge bibliography on piano acoustics, embracing even 18th and 19th century work - I laboured over this bibliography since my student time. Since 1976 I was a head of the lab.

Anyhow, my young years were full of events - bad and good, fun and dangerous. I am thankful to my kindest grandmother Liubov' Ruvinskaya and to my wonderful parents Semion and Maria Galembo - they did much more than their best for me and my two loved brothers - Vladimir and Ury.