by September 1939; Still started to write the score on September 9. The piece premiered on June 25, 1940, at Lewisohn Stadium to an audience of 13,000. Artur Rodziński conducted the New York Philharmonic; the choral sections were sung by a choir directed by Wen Talbert and the New York MacDowell Club, known as the Schola Cantorum. Talbert, a pianist, cellist, and jazz bandleader, led the Negro Chorus of the Federal Theatre Project, which performed in several Federal Theatre productions including Bassa Moona and How Long Brethren? (1937), a dance by Helen Tamiris. The program also included a performance by Paul Robeson. A notice by Still's wife Verna Arvey in the New York Times in advance of the premiere wrote:… Miss Chapin's poem is the voicing of her deep conviction that lynching is a serious flaw in the fabric of our American democracy, and her belief that this conviction is held by the majority of Americans in the South and the North. Plain-Chant for America Soon after And They Lynched Him, Still and Chapin collaborated for a second time on Plain-Chant for America (1941). According to Chapin's New York Times obituary, she regarded the work as "her reaffirmation of democracy". The poem is dedicated to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In an article on Plain-Chant, Arvey quotes Chapin on the genesis of the work:An American poem had been germinating in my mind for a long time, but the final circumstance that thrust it into being was the fact that I had spent a few days in the company of some persons who were sympathetic with the Fascists, whose talk showed me vividly the gap between totalitarianism and the American democracy in which I believed. The emotion of the poem began there; it found completion when we stood behind President Roosevelt in the sunshine at Key West … while he made a fine radio broadcast opening the San Francisco Fair.The piece, written for orchestra and baritone, was complete by early October 1941—although Chapin said in an interview at the time that it was written in 1938. It premiered on October 23, 1941, of that year at Carnegie Hall. John Barbirolli conducted the New York Philharmonic, and Wilbur Evans delivered the baritone solo. Reception Critics have generally regarded Chapin's work as skillful but unoriginal. Harriet Monroe, reviewing Chapin's collection Outside of the World in Poetry in 1932, noted "the quietly meditative tone of