Working in harmony: Ciaran Ryan shows a new generation of Cuban piano tuners how to use new tools

Surely the piano is the supreme achievement of the instrument maker's art. This miraculous assembly of wood, felt, steel and copper turns a single musician into an ensemble and puts extraordinary subtleties of touch and dynamics at the fingertips of its finest exponents. Even today, with all manner of keyboards and input devices available to the modern musician, the piano forte – from the Italian for 'soft-loud' – remains pre-eminent in western music, from conservatories to orchestra pits to jazz clubs. And, as the setting for a million daily piano lessons across the world from Havana to Fermanagh, it is the instrument before which the secrets of music are passed from one generation to the next. Pianos are important.

Pianists in Cuba face challenges that their peers in Ireland can't imagine. Cubans love the piano and it plays a central role in their music, both on the stage and in the schools, but the island's tropical climate is particularly hard on things made from wood, felt, steel and copper. To be worthy of the island's best piano players, like Chucho Valdes or Frank Fernandez, Cuba's pianos need the sort of care and attention that Irish pianos receive in the National Concert Hall (NCH) and the Academy of Music. Alas, due to the US trade embargo, piano technicians on the island cannot buy the tools and materials they need, and as the older generation of Cuban tuners retires, the skills that go with the tools are also disappearing.

Ciaran Ryan from Galway, one of the small community of tuners who care for Ireland's pianos, noticed this when he first visited Cuba as part of American tuner Ben Treuhaft's 'Send a Piana to Havana' project in 2004. Treuhaft's tuning brigades were a brave act of solidarity by left-leaning Americans, but Ryan and his Irish colleagues soon became convinced that cast-off American pianos were not what Cuba needed. What it needed was a means of training its own tuners and maintaining the pianos they already had.

So Ryan joined with others, including composer and Lyric FM presenter Ellen Cranitch, and began to devise what has become the Una Corda project. They organised a series of fundraising concerts, secured the support of leading pianists, including Barry Douglas, Joanna McGregor and Michael O'Suilleabhain, and raised enough money to start buying materials. Then they persuaded various of Ireland's leading tuners – including Alex Jeffares of Jeffares Pianos in Bandon, and Paul Wade who tunes the pianos in the NCH – to make a trip to Cuba at their own expense to train, advise and support a new generation of tuners.

Ryan is back in Cuba this summer, accompanied this time by Dubliner Feena Lynch, the tuner responsible for the pianos at the Academy of Music in Dublin's Westland Row. With support from leading Cuban pianists like Valdes, Fernandez and recent visitor to Dublin, Roberto Fonseca, and official recognition from the Cuban Ministry of Culture, the project now has a central role in rebuilding the facilities at the national piano workshop in old Havana. What Ryan and Feena weren't counting on (not to mention the Sunday Tribune's jazz correspondent, along to lend a hand) was witnessing Hurricane Ike as it roared over the island last week. Humidity and termites may wreak their own quiet havoc on Cuba's pianos, but tropical storms pose a whole other level of threat to the island's cultural life, and gave us all a deeper understanding of how disgraceful and unhelpful the US embargo is in a society that is otherwise a model of stability and development in Latin America.

The second strand of the project is where you come in. Anyone travelling to Cuba can make a real contribution to the country they're visiting by becoming one of Una Corda's mules. Volunteers simply carry a package of piano parts with them in their luggage when they go. It's all entirely above board, and several dozen Irish tourists have already lent a hand. It's a great way to make your trip more than just a holiday and an unbeatable entrée to Cuban musical culture. Just make contact with Una Corda's man in Havana when you land and arrange to drop the materials into the venerable national piano workshop. Think of it as carbon neutral for the soul!

For more information, email unacordaproject@gmail.com