Farr Brings Sounds of the Pacific to Michigan

Mar 26th, 2010

Gareth Farr is visiting the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, USA for a few weeks to give lectures and demonstrations on music of the Pacific, including his own.

On 18 March Farr presented a broad overview of artistic life in New Zealand, as well as other Pacific Islands, showcasing the compositions of various composers from New Zealand. His lecture on 31 March focuses on the music of the Cook Islands, specifically the traditional log drum music of Rarotonga, which Farr has studied in depth and considers a dynamic and engaging percussion style.

The culmination of this visit will include the world premiere of Farr’s Pukul Wainui, (‘Big Water Percussion,’ in English) for percussion ensemble and Javanese Gamelan orchestra, an adaptation of the earlier work Pukul, for percussion quintet. The University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble and Javanese Gamelan orchestra will combine forces for this work as part of their free concert ‘Introductions’, which is to include other eclectic combinations of instruments with percussion, led by Joseph Gramley and ethnomusicologist Susan Walton.

In an article on AnnArbor.com, Susan Isaacs Nisbett quotes Farr describing the work: ‘Basically, it’s a piece that is effectively a dialogue between the percussion of two different cultures, Indonesian and European. It’s a piece for gamelan, with a few rhythms that are mine, and then you have the percussionists with more Western-style instruments.’

‘They all got together in the same room last night,’ he said, speaking about a March 17 rehearsal of the gamelan with the Western percussionists, ‘and my God, it was loud!’

'U-M Gamelan Concert combines old and new' by Susan Isaacs Nisbett, 26 March 2010.

Read the complete article on annarbor.com.

Photo: Susan Walton & Gareth Farr