Denmark singer Marianna Greenham to take her powerful songs to the stage at Denmark Festival of Voice

When Marianna Greenham performs at the Denmark Festival of Voice this weekend, it will mark a long-awaited return to the stage for a woman whose love for music has never wavered. Originally from the Netherlands, Greenham first came to Australia in 1979 as a university student to visit her aunty, uncle and brother who had immigrated to Denmark. It was there that she met her soon-to-be husband Kim for the first time and, after a whirlwind romance, Greenham moved here permanently one year later and the couple were married. Greenham soon made Denmark her adopted home and said she had “never been homesick” since making the move across the world. The couple went on to have three children, who attended Woodbury Boston Primary School in Kronkup, where Greenham soon realised the music program could do with some improvement. Coming from a musical family where her father played violin, trombone, piano and accordion, her mother played the mandolin and her brother the double bass and tuba, a musical education for her children was very important to Greenham. Hilversum, the city where she grew up in the Netherlands, was renowned as the capital of TV and radio broadcasting, and her father was involved in building recording studios. Greenham was surrounded by music growing up, and was a pianist and singer herself who toured Europe as the front woman of a gospel-pop group as a teenager. So when she saw the music program at her children’s Australian school was based around the humble recorder, she decided to do something about it. “I realised it wasn’t good enough and I needed to set up a really good music program, which I did,” Greenham said. “And in the process I created lots of songs for the kids.” Greenham led the students in performances of her original children’s music, which eventually caught the eye of jazz pianist and composer Will Upson, who helped her record the songs into a 14-track album. “He helped me to get the bass tracks down first on piano and then we selected children’s voices from the school, and from Denmark, and kids from Albany were involved,” she said. The album was released and highly recommended for use at home and school by the Australia Society for Music Education. Greenham and Upson collaborated again on a production of her song ‘Ernada’, the idea for which came to Greenham one day in 1991 while she was washing the dishes before going to work and listening to a radio news report about the war in Bosnia. “I was so angry,” she said. “I knew the story of my nephew who was in the Netherlands working as a Red Cross worker with refugees that came from Bosnia.” During his work there her nephew had met and fallen in love with a Bosnian refugee named Ernada. Hearing how horrible the situation was, and knowing the story of their love, Greenham was inspired to write a song. “It was like it was just written in my forehead,” she said. “I had to go to the school but I heard this pounding rhythm in my head, and it just came all together, the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, it was a really powerful experience.” She went to work and taught her classes but her mind was occupied with the song. “When I came home I still had it there and I said to the kids, ‘baked beans on toast tonight, I’m going behind the piano’. “And I quickly wrote the basics down, then I took it to Will Upson, to his home, and I sang it for him.” Upson helped Greenham arrange the song for a full orchestra, and Greenham ended up recording the song with the WA Symphony Orchestra for the International Red Cross Bosnia Appeal. But what was even more special for Greenham was when she performed the song as a surprise at the wedding of Ernada and her nephew in the Netherlands. The couple had no idea she had written the song inspired by them, let alone transformed it into an orchestral performance. Ernada will be just one of the original songs Greenham will perform at the festival. The performance will be a homecoming of sorts for the singer who pressed pause on her musical career for 10 years to focus on her family as her daughter underwent cancer treatment. “It was really weird because finally when the festival made contact with me as an artist they said ‘Do you need a hotel? Do you need a ticket? Where are you based?’,” Greenham said. “I said ‘In Denmark, I’ve been here for 42 years’. I thought that was so funny. I’ve been here for so long and they had no idea because I haven’t been performing.”