An Irishman has beaten global competition to win the contract to build a £500,000 pipe organ for a prestigious music conservatory in China.
Mr Kenneth Jones, from Bray, in Co Wicklow, is to construct the organ, which will contain over 2,000 pipes, for the new concert hall of the middle school of the Chinese Central Music Conservatory at Fang Zhuang in Beijing.
The Wicklow man, who employs 16 people in his organ-building business, returned from Beijing to Ireland this week after finalising the deal. Companies from Europe and the US were among those who tendered for the project.
Kenneth Jones and Associates has been supplying organs to various countries for the last 27 years and is currently building an organ for a Catholic church near Hiroshima in Japan. The company has built 20 organs in the US, in states from Alaska to Florida. It has also supplied organs in Australia and Europe.
It is responsible for the largest mechanical action organ in London - in St Peter's in Eaton Square - and the recently completed organ in the chapel of Rugby School in England. The firm also constructed the organs in the National Concert Hall and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.
Mr Jones studied arts and engineering in Trinity College and started organ-building in Africa in 1961. He established his business in Bray in 1973 and is the only pipe organ builder in the state.
He told The Irish Times that the organ for Beijing would be built and assembled at his company's workshop in Bray. "It will then be disassembled, packed into containers and shipped to Beijing."
A team will travel to Beijing to put the organ together and Mr Jones will do the final check on it before Chinese audiences start to enjoy its music. The organ will occupy 100 cubic metres and will weigh 10 tons.
"It will be used for concerts in the new hall, which seats 1,000, similar in size to the National Concert Hall in Dublin," he said.
Mr Jones's Chinese agent is Mr Li Jiayi, who visited him in Co Wicklow last year. "He liked what he saw and asked if he could represent me in China."
Mr Jones hopes that this will be the first of several organs he will build for Chinese concert halls.