Roderick Borcherding

Roderick Borcherding was born on October 10th 1991. In 2001 he started playing the viola in a before school string orchestra program. A couple years after he joined the Tacoma Youth Symphony in 2003 and was a part of that program until 2010, holding a spot in the first stand of the viola section from 2004 to 2010. In 2004 he took a music theory class in association with the Youth Symphony. There he became interested in composition. In 2005 he won a competition held by the Tacoma Youth Symphony to get a spot as a concerto soloist. That year he played the Telemann Viola Concerto with the orchestra one tier below the one he was in at the time. Also in 2005 he was commissioned to write a piece for 4 violas by the string orchestra teacher from _______. On the day it was performed he received a plaque of congratulations from the school. From 2006-2010 he took private viola lessons at UPS with Joyce Ramee. Also from 2006-2010 he went to the Max Arnoff Viola Institute, a summer program organized by his teacher. He won scholarships to go there the last two years of his attendance at that camp. In 2006 he wrote a string quartet and a year later in 2007 showed the string quartet to the composer at UPS, Robert Hutchinson. He agreed to have the first movement played in the community chambers concert in December 2007. In 2008 he was commissioned to write a piece for 5 violas for the Max Arnoff Viola institute and it was premiered there July of that year. In 2009 he auditioned and made it into the all-Northwest orchestra and went to Spokane for the rehearsals and performance where the orchestra performed the first movement of Mahler's 2nd symphony and the last movement of Shostakovich's 5th symphony under Gerard Schwartz. Later, he went with that orchestra to do the same performance at Benaroya Hall. In 2010 he was accepted into Cornish College of the Arts and in 2011 he wrote another piece for string quartet, a performance of which was taken up by the Coriliagno Quartet.