Composer Neil Martin got the chance to pursue his own family history in his latest commission. He talks to Siobhán Long

He has a glint in his eye that whispers more of the storyteller than the composer: one for whom words are the stuff of life, and notes, the stuff of dreams. But Belfast cellist, piper and composer Neil Martin is that most ambidextrous of artists: one who sidles up alongside a conversation with the same facility that he does an octave or two. His fluency as a performer is not unknown either; and whether composing for Matt Molloy or basking in the belly of his beloved West Ocean String Quartet, Martin marries his music with an impish sense of humour.

Martin has been busier than ever lately, with the Belfast Arts Festival's commission to compose a piece for full symphony orchestra, featuring solo piper Liam Ó Floinn, focusing on the theme of migration. Although he had composed many works previously, none of them have been of concert length, or as thematically unified as his hugely personal no tongue can tell.

It is a musical voyage around the life story of his maternal grandparents - a tale replete with all the drama and heartbreak of premature bereavement.

"My granddad spent his life at sea," Martin recounts. "I learned the word 'posthumous' very early in life. My mother was a 'posthumous child', and we probably learned that word at eight or nine, at that age when kids love big words. This was our big word."

Martin's family history was filled with the drama of his grandfather's early death, and his grandmother's subsequent resilience in raising five children (including Martin's mother, who was born four months after her father's death). While acknowledging that such a personal tale can be broached with a certain flexibility by a composer, by virtue of the absence of words (in contrast to the rawness of a novelist's or a poet's fettering to words, he suggests), this was nonetheless an undertaking that demanded much from both himself, as composer, and his mother, who held sole ownership of the story.

"There's a certain way in which you can still hide behind it," Martin acknowledges, "but it was important to get my mother's permission beforehand. And this was personal for me because she was the conduit for so much: my granny playing the fiddle, her father before her playing the fiddle, so I felt a very strong connection with my kin back to the middle of the 19th century, but I never really teased out these feelings until I began to write the piece last summer.

"I think there's a great universality and internationalism about music that's beyond words, and if you can have music executed in a certain way, I don't think it needs anything more. It speaks for itself, just as a brilliant Jack B Yeats or Picasso painting does. Instrumental music doesn't force people into a corner, but offers them something that they can interpret in whatever way they want."

Martin's composition borrows its title from a line in the well-known tragic seafaring song, Lord Franklin, in which the pregnant Lady Franklin bewails the loss of her husband and his crew in the North West Passage in 1845: "The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell."

The parallels between Franklin's tale and his own family's story were surprisingly close, but the aptness of the title only came to Martin after he had completed the piece.

What preceded its christening was an intensive two-month period of composition. Neil Martin approached the task with a mix of apprehension and anticipation.

"I was delighted and shit scared at the same time!," he admits, grinning. "I felt I was ready to attempt this challenge. I'd written a lot for strings, brass and woodwind; for theatre and television, and I'd always wanted to write something big for Liam. I suppose there was a certain amount of professional craft involved in marrying Liam's piping with full orchestra. The pipes emit a very stark and indescribable emotion that's beyond words. It's a language so individual - and as I was dealing with such an emotional topic, I felt a lot of things came together that simply made sense."

No tongue can tell comprises four movements, built on images both real and imagined by Martin. "I imagined my grandfather on his deathbed, so full of morphine, and not really connected with what was going on around him, and my grandmother faced with the prospect of being left alone with four children, and another on the way." Progressing from the opening "funeral march" to the final movement, "sheltering sound", Martin navigated a path through a story that continued to reveal itself to him as he wrote.

"It's that dreadful juxtaposition of death and birth that my granny had to endure," he notes. "The joy of having a daughter at a time when she'd just lost her mate. They were head over heels in love with one another, which I learned from reading letters they had written, and yet I had never thought like that about my grandparents until I started to write."

His grandmother's success in giving all five of her children an education, and seeing them take flight into their own worlds was an achievement that even today astounds her grandson.

"I don't know how she did it," he says, describing the lives of his mother, her sisters and her brothers, including poet, writer and champion piper, Tomás Ó Canainn and writer Aodh Ó Canainn. "None of them got embroiled in anything. They had a great focus in life."

Neil Martin knows that commissions don't often come with such personally relevant potential.

"I'm really thankful for the serendipity of so many things coming together," he confesses. "I knew my granny well, because she lived well into her 80s, but I feel I know my grandfather better for having been on this journey. Not only did I never know him personally, but neither did my mother, so it was a case of reaching way back to 1935, which was when he died."

The full horror of a life cut short dawned on Martin when he began to make comparisons between his grandfather's death and his own (comparatively uneventful) passage through life. "I would only be slightly older than my grandfather was, and the thought of dying so young is unspeakable. I'm only starting now to actually understand a little of life, or to express a little of my understanding of life through music. I think that it takes an awful lot of time to find your voice, or to find some way, as honestly as you can, to express yourself in a medium outside of words."

• No tongue can tell will be performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, conducted by David Brophy, with the West Ocean String Quartet, and with soloist Liam Ó Floinn on uilleann pipes, as part of this year's ESB Ceol Irish Music Festival in the National Concert Hall tomorrow