Golden Rain Baby is a lullaby composed in the 1990s in response to a request from a friend in New Zealand who wanted a song for her girls’ high school choir. I was doing some work about Indonesian music at the time, with Professor Henry Johnson from Otago University, so I combined the two interests, and the song was performed a few times around then, most notably by Vocarmony from Queen’s High School in Dunedin, who took it on tour with them to New South Wales. I did hear a recording of them at the time, but seem to have mislaid that!

The work I did with Henry was a teaching reource for use in high schools and university ethnomusicology courses. I was inspired by various characteristics of Bubaran Hudan Mas from Central Java, to compose this song, and created a brief activity for students to use to help them understand how I’d adapted those characteristics in this song. The activity’s here, if you want to have a go! The idea originally was that you would photocopy this page, cut out the boxes and make a timeline of musical events in the song with glue and paper, using a recording and the score to help you – very 1990s, but quite effective at getting to know the song!!!

Golden Rain Baby – Brief Analysis Activity

There was also a performance in Brisbane by the women’s choir Chanterelle under the direction of Sandra Milliken in the early 2000s, but alas there’s no recording of that that I’m aware of!

In March 2022, I was asked by Colin Maddocks of U3A in Queensland to prepare something for his course on the influence of Indonesian arts on Western artists, so I made this video explaining how Golden Rain Baby was influenced by the Javanese Gamelan piece Bubaran Hudan Mas.

I also made an explanatory hand-out for Colin to display or hand out to his students, briefly outlining how I had been inspired by Bubaran Hudan Mas.

Golden Rain Baby Inspiration Notes

At the time of writing this blog (April 2025), there is a video on Youtube of Bubaran Hudan Mas, which you might like to listen to:

The song is dedicated to my friend Sarah, who had a baby at the time of the song’s composing. Also, I do like to write a lullaby!