No one seems to have quoted Dvorak himself. "I do not intend to adopt melodies and treat them as themes. But I study certain melodies until I have assimilated their characteristic features and can create musical figures from them which preserve their characteristic features while taking them further...In this sense I was concerned to write the new symphony. I did not really use any of the Negro and Indian melodies. I simply wrote original themes of my own and developed them, whereby I exploited all the possibilities of modern rhythm, harmonics, contrapuntal technique and orchestral colour." A New York critic, after the first performance, stated that Dvorak had declared an allegiance to American music. Dvorak responded " The motifs are my own, and some I brought with me. That is and remains Czech music." Uwe Kramer wrote "It was only possible to confound American, Czech and "Indian" elements because at that time no-one would see that the pentatonic scales (in the English horn melody of the largo) and the syncopation in the first and third themes of the first movement are just as characteristic of Bohemian folk music as of Negro spirituals" (Comments reproduced in the Sony booklet accompanying the Eugene Ormandy interpretation).