Portrait of Leopold Stokowski

Two days after its world premiere, Stokowski conducted Dawson’s symphony for the Philadelphia Symphony’s weekly radio broadcast, providing the Negro Folk Symphony with a nation-wide audience. The following week, Dawson’s symphony was given its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on November 20. A New York Times review of the concert commended the symphony as possessing a “dramatic feeling . . . and distinctness of melodic speech, and a barbaric turbulence” (Brown, 76-77; Monroe 125).