Farrar, Lloyd Philip (1934-2025) | University of Illinois Archives

Lloyd P. Farrar (1934-2025) was an organologist and musicologist. The son of Dr. Milton Dyer Farrar and Helen Farrar, he was born and grew up in Urbana, IL. From 1932 to 1946, Farrar's father was a professor of entomology with the Illinois State Natural History Survey Division. For three years, the family lived in Durham, New Hampshire while Dr. Farrar worked as the associate director of the Crop Protection Institute. His family moved once again to Clemson, South Carolina in 1949 after his father became the head of Clemson University's Entomology and Zoology Department. Lloyd Farrar attended the Philips Academy, an all-male boarding high school, in Andover Massachussetts, graduating in 1952.

After starting college as a geologist in North Carolina, he hitchhiked across the country to the University of Illinois where he studied trombone and musicology. As a music major, he joined Phi Mu Alpha Fraternity. He met his wife Doris Vogt, who was also studying music and was a member of Mu Phi Epsilon. The two were married in 1956. At the University of Illinois, Farrar performed as the principal trombonist in the University Symphony Orchestra as well as on sackbut with the Collegium Musicum. Farrar graduated with his bachelors degree in music in 1955. The following year he earned a masters degree in musicology.

Farrar then spent a year in the Netherlands on a Fullbright Grant studying early Dutch music. Following this, he and his wife traveled to the University of Texas at Austin where he began his PhD in Musicology, but he never completed his dissertation. While he was in Washington DC studying at the Library of Congress, Farrar took a job teaching music history and conducting the wind band at Mary Washington College in Viriginia. In addition, he formed the nearby Prince George's Civic Orchestra in Washington DC, conducting the orchestra from 1965 to 1969.

Around 1971, Farrar began to lose his sight and abandoned much of his intensive bibliographic work at the time, but continued his organological work. During the mid 1970s he collected hundreds of musical instruments as a means of correcting and expanding Lindesay Langwill's instrumental history book to include American manufacturers. Between the late 1970s and mid 1980s, Farrar was one of the country's leading organologists, writing articles for The Woodwind Quarterly, The International Trumpet Guild, The American Musical Instrument Society, The Serpent Newsletter, and the American Musicological Society as well as serving on the board of governors for the American Musical Instrument Society, where he chaired the committee for revisions to the Langwill Index. In 1988, Farrar examined and arranged the John Held and Chatfield Band Library at the Utah State Archives. In the late 1980s he began the Patuxent Martial Musick Collection in Colesville, Maryland, which was later transferred to the Sousa Archives in 1995. In 1996, the Farrars moved to Norris, Tennessee. Farrar died on January 10, 2025 in his Tennessee home.

"Church Wedding for Doris J. Vogt, Lloyd P. Farrar," Belleville Daily Advocate (September 4, 1956), page 6.

"Ag program at Clemson Reorganized," The State (Columbia, SC) (June 30, 1953), page 6.

1940 US Census Records "Lloyd Btrslip Farrar [Lloyd Philip Farrar]"