Why she matters
Scottsdale’s cultural story is usually told through painters, jewelers and architects. Louise Lincoln Kerr gave it music. A classically trained violinist who had played in the Cleveland orchestra and worked in the New York recording business, she arrived in the Valley in 1936, when it had almost no professional music at all, and spent four decades building it: a founding chair in the Phoenix Symphony, money and energy for chamber and choral groups, and more than 100 compositions of her own.
Her most lasting gift is a building. In 1959 she put up an adobe music studio next to her house on Scottsdale Road, and some of the century’s great players performed in it for a few hundred listeners at a time. It went to Arizona State University on one condition, that it keep making music.
Where to find her mark today
ASU Kerr Cultural Center. The house and studio at 6110 N. Scottsdale Road, west of the road off Rose Lane, still run a season of chamber music, jazz and recitals.
Camelback Corridor. Kerr sits at the corridor’s northeastern edge, where Scottsdale addresses meet the Paradise Valley line.
The house and the studio
The house went up in 1948 on desert and citrus land at what was then the northern edge of Scottsdale, built of adobe bricks made from the site’s own earth. The 1959 studio, built with the help of Mexican artisans, faces east in deference to Hopi custom, has eleven hand-carved sugar-pine doors, and seated about 210 until a 1969 addition by architect J. Frederick Fleenor added bench seating for 100 more, taking it past 300. Guest cottages on the property, known as the Shacks, put up visiting musicians.
The result is a rare Spanish Colonial adobe in a city better known for ranch houses and resort stucco. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 14, 2010, and a 2008 conservation easement between ASU and the city protects it for fifty years.
The full story
Louise Lincoln Kerr was born in Cleveland in 1892, the eldest daughter of John C. Lincoln, the engineer and inventor behind Lincoln Electric. Her mother started her on piano at six and violin at seven. She studied at Barnard, took composition with Columbia faculty and, according to ASU’s history of her, studied with Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. In 1913 she joined the Cleveland orchestra as one of its youngest members and one of the first two women to win a seat. In the 1920s she worked for the Aeolian Company in New York, proofing piano rolls, and married Peter Kerr; they raised eight children.
The family moved to Arizona in 1936 for a daughter’s health, and in the 1930s Valley there was little formal music to join. Kerr set about building it. She was a charter violinist and benefactor when the Phoenix Symphony formed in 1947, and over the following decades she helped launch or sustain chamber music, choral and youth music groups across the Valley. She also studied Hopi music, recording in kivas, and turned what she learned into Enchanted Mesa, which the Phoenix Symphony premiered in 1955, one of the first works by a woman the orchestra performed.
In 1948 she built her adobe house on Scottsdale Road, and in 1959 the studio beside it. From then on, through the 1960s and after, Isaac Stern, Pablo Casals and the Budapest and Juilliard string quartets came to play in it, and Will and Ariel Durant were among the guests. Arizona knew her as the Grand Lady of Music.
She died on December 10, 1977, at her home in Cottonwood. How the house and studio reached Arizona State University depends on the source. The city’s register report says they were given to ASU on her death, and ASU Kerr says she donated them shortly before. The 2009 National Register nomination, prepared by ASU, says she had sold the whole property to the Scottsdale Seven Development Corporation in the early 1970s, then asked it to sell the house and studio to the university and gave ASU the money to buy them. All three agree on her condition, that it remain a performance venue. ASU took ownership in 1981, the year management passed to ASU Gammage. She was inducted into the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame in 2004, and her manuscripts are in the ASU archives. Her era of the Valley’s cultural life begins in the ranches-and-war chapter.