Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who had received Western-oriented musical instruction from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, had used folk songs in his student overture "The Storm". However, in the early 1870s he became interested in using folk songs as valid symphonic material. Tchaikovsky's greatest debt in this regard was to Glinka's "Kamarinskaya". He believed fervently that in "Kamarinskaya" lay the core of the entire school of Russian symphonic music, "just as the whole oak is in the acorn", as he would write in his diary in 1888.