Before the premiere of Alabama March: A talk with Máté Balogh
Máté Balogh's Alabama March was commissioned by the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra of Alabama. The premiere will take place on September 27, 2019, in Huntsville. We asked the composer about composing for orchestra, his relationship with tradition, and the meeting of different cultures.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 200th 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.
