Muses Trio have just launched an Australian Cultural Fund campaign for Her Australian Songbook — and I’ve been invited to arrange one of the songs that started my journey as an arranger and composer.

 

The song is Delta Goodrem’s Born to Try.

 

When I was a little girl, Born to Try was my favourite song in the first piano book I ever taught myself from. I was taking piano lessons at the time, but I was also completely obsessed with contemporary pop music. I loved the songs on the radio, I loved singing, and I loved playing the piano. What I hadn't yet realised was that these two worlds — the contemporary music I adored and the classical piano training I was receiving — could actually collide.

 

Born to Try was one of the first places they did. I taught myself the chords and tried to sing along. I couldn't sing it for my life with my little voice, but I didn't care. I loved that song.

 

As a teenager, I began arranging pop music for piano and strings. I spent my lunch breaks in the music cells at school with my friends, learning new arrangements and experimenting with how songs I loved could be transformed for different instruments.

 

Years later, I became a composer.

 

Looking back, arranging was one of the most natural pathways into composition for me. I loved taking something that already existed and asking what else it could become — and eventually that instinct grew into writing music of my own.

 

So being asked to arrange Born to Try for Muses Trio feels incredibly special. It brings me back to the beginning. For Her Australian Songbook, Muses Trio are commissioning new piano trio arrangements of songs by Australian women, bringing together composers including Elena Kats-Chernin, Nat Bartsch and me, alongside an opportunity for emerging female composers to develop new work through the project (mentored by yours truly!).

 

The result will be a new body of Australian chamber music that celebrates women songwriters while creating new possibilities for songs that are already part of our cultural memory.

 

And for me, there is something wonderfully circular about returning to Born to Try.

 

The song that I loved as a little girl — before I knew what a composer was, before I knew that arranging could become a career, before I knew that the two musical worlds I loved could belong together — is now becoming the material for a new piece of my own. I get to pay homage to the song, to the woman who wrote it, and to the little girl who loved it.

 

Muses Trio are a not-for-profit organisation, and they have launched an Australian Cultural Fund campaign to raise the funds needed to commission the new arrangements and bring Her Australian Songbook to life.

 

If you’d like to support the project, you can contribute here:

Support Her Australian Songbook through the Australian Cultural Fund

 

Every contribution helps Muses Trio create new Australian music and support the composers involved.

 

(And yes — after all these years, I can finally sing Born to Try).