Gareth Farr
Gareth Farr's music has been performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia and the NZ String Quartet. He has composed for ballet, theatre, dance, film and television (Kaitangata Twitch, He Paki Taonga i a Māui). Farr is also an accomplished percussionist, who has regularly performed with the NZSO.
Farr's music is heavily influenced by Indonesian gamelan, kapa haka, Pacific Islands drumming, and Japanese percussion instruments. Farr has also donned sequins and stilettos to appear as his alter ego Lilith LaCroix, the drumming drag queen of live show Drumdrag.
Among other events, Farr was commissioned to create music for the 50th anniversary of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the opening of the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and the opening of Te Papa museum. He composed the percussion concerto Hikoi for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.
Gareth Farr was born in Wellington to a trade unionist father and a writer mother. He studied composition and percussion performance at Auckland University. Later, at Victoria University, Farr's music was increasingly using the rhythms and textures of the set of Indonesian instruments known as the gamelan. Farr talks in this documentary about first hearing a gamelan orchestra, back in 1989. "It just blew me away". Since then, much of his music since has been gamelan-inspired.
At New York's Eastman School of Music, he studied composition and graduated with a Masters of Music. In 1993, at age 25, he was appointed composer-in-residence by Chamber Music New Zealand. Farr was the youngest composer to hold the position. His work Terra Incognita premiered in 2008, the same year he became Composer in Residence for the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
Farr has written for a number of TV dramas, often for Wellington-based production house Gibson Group. He composed the soundtrack for their TV movie Clare (2000), based on one of the women caught up in the "unfortunate experiment" at National Women's Hospital.
His other work for Gibson Group includes docudramas Nancy Wake - The White Mouse (2014), and Mistress Mercy (2018), plus detective series Duggan (1999) and The Strip (2002), a show about a corporate lawyer who opens a strip club. After composing the music for disaster tale Eruption (2010) he was nominated for an Aotearoa TV Award the following year for another TV movie, Panic at Rock Island.
Elsewhere, at Production Shed TV, Farr has composed for Margaret Mahy fantasy series Kaitangata Twitch, Brian Brake documentary Painting with Light and legal docudrama Friend of the Friendless. All were directed by Production Shed boss Yvonne Mackay. For Kaitangata Twitch, Farr joined Māori instrument expert Richard Nunns to create music and sound effects to create the impression of an island possessed. In 2016 he composed the score for Production Shed's animated series He Paki Taonga i a Māui, inspired by items in Te Papa museum.
Farr's short film scores include Dead Letters (2006), a World War II-era romance directed by actor Paolo Rotondo, ensemble Spring Flames (2002), drama Tree (2016) and dance film Karanga (2017).
In 2021 Farr composed for his first feature documentary, Signed, Theo Shoon, which profiled the Dutch-Kiwi artist. Farr has also gone before the camera. Artsville doco Farr from Heaven (2006) chronicles a busy six month period as he composes and rehearses music for Toi Whakaari, a Gallipoli commemoration, and "the loudest thing in the world" for percussion ensemble Strike. (Read backgrounders on Farr from Heaven here, including one by producer John A Givins. Farr can also be seen performing with Strike in this short film).
Farr was the subject of an earlier doco, Between Two Worlds (1996), directed by Michael Heath. Heath has argued that it was extensively recut against his wishes, a victim of political correctness and homophobia.
In 2006 Farr was made an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit, for his services to music and entertainment. In terms of his wide-ranging contributions to the arts, he often refers to himself as "an entertainer".
"I do set out to entertain and have used the word entertainer to describe myself, even though people think of someone like Howard Morrison when you do that," he told The Wellingtonian in 2011. "It's more that I try to bring colour and life to my music —there's nothing wrong with people being entertained."
Profile updated 17 February 2025
Sources include
Gareth Farr website. Accessed 17 February 2025
Michael Heath
Unknown writer, 'The Wellingtonian Interview: Gareth Farr' (Interview) - The Wellingtonian, 3 February 2011
'Gareth Farr' SOUNZ website. Accessed 30 January 2025