School of Music friend Roger Soder has recently created enhanced opportunities for UW strings students with his generous contributions to the memorial scholarship honoring his parents that he and his late wife, Jane, first established in 2008.
Since its creation, the Pauline and Paul Soder Memorial Scholarship has helped financially needy and musically promising students at the School of Music continue their UW educations. Directed to supporting undergraduate or graduate students studying viola or other orchestral string instruments, the scholarship pays special tribute to Roger’s late mother, Pauline, a Seattle native who took music lessons at the University of Washington before launching a 47-year career with the Seattle Symphony in 1936.
Pauline and Paul Soder met while sailing on a passenger ship to Alaska. Paul was a sailor and Pauline a violist performing as part of a trio providing evening music for the passengers. Bonding over their shared love of music, they eventually went on to form a partnership that produced a lifetime of musical memories.
“I just remember the sounds of the viola in the house all my life,” Roger told the Seattle Times in 1995 upon his mother’s passing. “It was wonderful.”
“Support from the Pauline and Paul Soder Memorial Scholarship has been awarded to strings students at the UW since 2008,” says School of Music director Joël-François Durand. “We are grateful to Roger Soder for his recent gifts enhancing this scholarship that helps promising young musicians finance their UW studies.”