How did it come to this commission?

Last December, Gergely Vajda, the chief conductor of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, asked me to compose a short piece to mark the 200^th anniversary of the founding of State of Alabama. It immediately occurred to me that I was going to write a symphonic march. I liked the idea so much that I completed it in two days. In hindsight, it occurred to me that maybe Weill's Alabama Song from Mahagonny might influence me. At the Franz Liszt Music Academy, I was teaching the history of Sprechgesang, so I did a lot of work with Weill at the time.

March is an existing musical movement and it helped a lot; it has a traditional instrumentation structure that provided security. I used the soloistic melody types used in the genre, partly the usual accompaniment figures. In an earlier piece of mine, Pseudomarsch, I used similar motifs. Although that work was only for brass band, I was not thinking of chamber music, but rather of bulky sound. With Pseudomarsch I won first prize at a composer competition in 2017; since then it has been recorded by the Hungarian Radio, has been broadcast several times, and in the meantime, I have received commissions from brass bands to compose marches – thus, to put it overstated, composing marches has become almost my trademark.

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