Farrar, Lloyd Phillip | University of Illinois Archives

Name: Farrar, Lloyd Phillip

Historical Note: Lloyd P. Farrar (ca. 1932) has been interested in musical instruments since he was a child. 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. After joining the Phi Mu Alpha Fraternity he met his wife Doris Vogt, then a member of Mu Phi Epsilon, both were involved in musical activities at the University and they were married in 1956. At the University of Illinois he 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 and his masters degree in 1956. After his time at the University of Illinois, Farrar spent a year in the Netherlands on a Fullbright Grant studying early Dutch music. He and his wife then 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 band at Mary Washington College in Viriginia. In addition, he helped to form 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, where Mr. Farrar continues to collect and write about musical instruments.