JAVS Fall 2012

families including Louise Lincoln Kerr. The viola at ASU is almost 16 inches (15 and 15/16 inches) or 406 mm. It has wide bouts, a spruce top, and a maple back. In Arizona, Louise Kerr became known as the “Grand Lady of Music.” 1 In 1959 she used an inher itance from her father (an engineer and real estate tycoon) to build her home, studio, and an artists’ colony in Scottsdale. Her studio was the original site of the Phoenix Chamber Music Society performanc es. Many famous musicians performed there, and she played chamber music at her studio with Isaac Stern, inviting professors and local musicians to join in. In addition, she helped co-found and/or develop The Phoenix Chamber Music Society, The Scottsdale Center for the Arts, The National Society of Arts and Letters, Monday Morning Musicals, The Bach and Madrigal Society, young Audiences, The Musicians Club, and the Phoenix Cello Society (now the Arizona Cello Society). 2 She was extremely generous with both her time and money. As a composer, Kerr wrote more than one hundred works including fifteen symphonic tone poems, twenty works for chamber or string orchestra, a vio lin concerto, five ballets and incidental music, numerous piano pieces, and about forty pieces of chamber music. Kerr’s chamber music includes a rich selection of string quartet movements; the String Quartet in A Major; piano quartets and quin tets; a Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano; numerous duos for piano and other instruments; and a few vocal pieces. According to her son William Kerr, she composed mostly at night, no doubt a necessity with eight children to care for (the last two boys were identical twins). 3 Her symphonic compositions were primarily written for and premiered by the Arizona State University Symphony. Other local groups such as the Mesa and Sun City Symphonies also performed her music. The Phoenix Symphony performed her tone poem Enchanted Mesa , written in 1948, as well as other symphonic works including Arizona Profiles , which was commissioned for the ground-breaking dedica tion ceremonies of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts

in 1968. Most of her chamber music pieces were written for friends to play at the many music gather ings held in her Scottsdale home and studio. She also composed during the summers at her ranch in Cottonwood, near Flagstaff. She won several awards in composition during her life and was a member of the Phoenix Composers’ Society. Unfortunately, almost none of these amazing pieces have been edit ed or published. When Kerr passed away in 1977, she left a great legacy to the College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University (ASU), establishing the Kerr Memorial Scholarship Fund at the School of Music. She pre sented her private music library to the ASU School of Music; most importantly, she also donated her extensive collection of orchestral and chamber music manuscripts (labeled MSS-90) to the ASU Archives and Manuscripts at Hayden Library. In addition, she donated her Scottsdale home and studio to ASU to be used as a chamber music venue, now the ASU Kerr Cultural Center. She received a gold medal for distinguished contribution to the arts from the National Society of Arts and Letters. Shortly before her death, Louise Kerr was awarded an honorary Doctorate from ASU, and she was posthumously inducted into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame on October 21, 2004. Kerr’s overall compositional style may be character ized as tonal and inspired by Classical and Romantic genres and forms. Her music is often enhanced by the local color of the American Southwest, and she developed a concept of Southwest Impressionism by studying the works of Impressionist painters who lived in California and in Arizona during the 1940s (she and her eldest daughter, Tammara, were both painters). The region was populated by Native Americans and Hispanics, and Kerr used elements of their music in her own compositions as well as the music of local cowboys. One can also hear the influ ence of the many famous pianists that she worked with in New york in the early 1920s and some jazz influence in certain pieces. Compositional Style

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