LDV101

19 TALICH QUARTET Dvořák had discovered the music of the African-American people at prayer, their songs of celebration and mourning. A few months after his arrival in New York, he was already criticising the country’s musicians for not paying sufficient attention to their heritage: ‘These negro melodies can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. . . . . These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American’, he remarked to a reporter about Negro spirituals in May 1893. As Pierre-Émile Barbier has observed, ‘the “American” elements of his music are characterised by the use of the pentatonic scale in the minor mode, a flattened seventh in place of the leading note, and dotted or syncopated rhythms in which the Czech tradition joins that of African-American music’. Nevertheless, the composer always denied having used melodies from Indian or African-American folklore. ‘I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian [ sic ] music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral colour.’