JAVS Fall 2012

T HE V IOLA M USIC OF L OUISE L INCOLN K ERR

the Institute of Musical Art, which would later become part of the Juilliard School of Music. She left New york around 1913 in order to join the Cleveland Municipal Orchestra under the direction of Christian Timner, another of her violin teachers. By 1920 she had returned to New york, where she met and married Peter Kerr (pronounced “Care”) and started her family. While in New york, she got a job working for the Aeolian Recording Company proofing piano rolls. There, Louise Kerr met with noted pianists and composers who were recording their music, including Sergey Prokofiev, Alfred Cortot, and George Gershwin. She was also a friend of the renowned conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos and the violinist Isaac Stern. Later, when Kerr worked in the sound booth studio of Duo Arts Records (at Aeolian), she assisted conductors in cor recting mistakes on early disk recordings of modern pieces. It was her job to sit in the glass booth, follow the score, and tell the conductors when a mistake occurred so they could re-record it. Eventually the Kerrs came west to Arizona for the health of one of their daughters. The family lived in Phoenix and later built homes in Cottonwood and Scottsdale. It was here that she turned toward the viola, in large part due to the theft of her violin, on December 7, 1941, the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. Later, she continued to perform on the viola as her main instrument with the Phoenix and Flagstaff Symphonies. Mrs. Kerr owned many valu able instruments but performed in the Phoenix Symphony on a 1781 viola labeled Michele Deconet. It is thought that Deconet (1713–1799), who was a German-born traveling violinist, brokered instruments for Venetian luthiers in other Italian cities during the latter part of the eighteenth century. The Michele Deconet viola is part of the string col lection that was donated to Arizona State University’s Herberger School of Music by three

Louise Lincoln Kerr, c. 1950 (Arizona State University, Department of Archives and Special Collections, CP SPC 183:6)

by CarolynWaters Broe

Louise Lincoln Kerr (1892–1977), American com poser, violist, and patron of the arts, was born April 24, 1892, in Cleveland, Ohio, and died December 10, 1977, in Cottonwood, Arizona, at her ranch. Kerr’s mother taught her to play the piano at age six and violin at age seven; she learned later in life to play viola. She continued her violin studies in Cleveland with Sol Marcosson, concertmaster and soloist with the early Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. In 1910 she attended Barnard College in New york where she studied music composition with two prominent Columbia University professors: Cornelius Rubnor and Daniel Gregory Mason. While at Barnard, she took private violin lessons at

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