BU Research Blog

At the beginning of 2014 BUDI was lucky enough to secure FIF CCCP funding to set up the BUDI orchestra, a partnership project with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra supported by BU Music Scholars and other students. I blogged about this during the rehearsal period and after the performance at the Festival of Learning, but as the project officially comes to an end as we write our final report I am blogging a final time to give a little update. First we won a poster prize two weeks ago at the 7th International Rural Dementia Summit running concurrently with the 7th Safety and Health in Agriculture and Rural Health Populations conference in Saskatchewan, Canada and Canadian colleagues are now interested in setting up their version of the BUDI orchestra in two provinces. We also secured some further funds to extend the project and are currently rehearsing for an informal Christmas performance that will take place in the Atrium/Starbucks on 12 December, do stop and listen as you enjoy your coffee! If any member of staff/student would like to join us as we rehearse, particularly anyone with a strong singing voice do get in touch with Laura (lreynolds@bournemouth.ac.uk)who can give you more information about our rehearsal schedule, as we are missing our BU Music Scholars this time round who led the singing part of the rehearsals so well in the initial project. We also secured funding from the Dorset Legacy Fund to begin a new orchestra project and this will commence in January 2015. We have submitted a larger grant application to conduct a multi-site study but we have a few months to go before we will hear if we are successful or not. We have received extremely positive feedback from our participants, students and BSO colleagues who have been part of the initial and ongoing project extension and the idea has been favourably met at regional and international conferences where we have shown the video we created documenting the project. The BU FIF provides an excellent opportunity to conduct pilot/proof of concept work and we are grateful for the funds received enabling us to undertake this work which has been the most fun project I’ve been involved with to date.