The Ulster Orchestra picked up two awards last night at the Allianz Arts & Business NI Awards.  The Building Blocks project with the Patton Group won the category for Arts, Business and Employees and the Up the Tempo project with the Ulster Bank won the category for Arts, Business and Young People.
 
Funded by Arts and Business, the interactive concert called Building Blocks featured musicians from the Ulster Orchestra, 63 children from Camphill and St. Colmcille’s Primary Schools in Ballymena, along with 15 Patton staff drawn from throughout the company and all with no prior musical know-how.  Appropriately the project was based around musical building blocks and was staged in the Braid, Ballymena Town Hall, Museum and Arts Centre which the Patton Group built. The musical workshop used the analogy of building a house to help with composing a piece of music. Bricks and trowels were used as percussion instruments.  The project was a creative, fun and interactive way of involving Patton Group employees and local school children in an informative musical education project.
 
The Up the Tempo project enabled 3,000 primary school pupils in 52 schools throughout Ireland to attend a series of musical workshops, focusing on rhythm, pitch and harmony.  The children composed, performed, listened and of course, had fun on this musical journey. The culmination of this event resulted in a family music workshop taking place in Belfast and Dublin with over 100 Ulster Bank employees and their children taking part.  Teachers have acknowledged the rich musical experience these workshops gave to hundreds of primary school pupils.  Thanks to this project a new generation of children has gained an appreciation of music and what it can help to achieve.
The Allianz Arts & Business NI Awards celebrates the very best in creative and pioneering partnerships between the arts and business sectors in Northern Ireland.