Eoin Duignan could barely believe the beauty or profundity of Harry Clarke's stained glass. So he decided to create a suite in response, writes Siobhán Long.

If music offers a window to the soul, then that of the piper and low-whistle player Eoin Duignan is a kaleidoscopic fanlight into a world where the spirit holds sway unopposed. Born in Dublin but living in the heart of west Co Kerry for two and a half decades, Duignan has strayed with his third album into a terrain hardly overburdened with fellow musicians in pursuit of a fast buck. Lumina is a six-part suite of music for low whistle that Duignan composed after being inspired by the magnificent Harry Clarke stained-glass windows in Díseart chapel, in Dingle.

Not a man to hurtle into the studio, tunes straggling in his wake, Duignan has been percolating the suite for four years. "It's been a long time on the go," he says, smiling sheepishly. "Friends of mine got married in that church, and I was blown away by the windows. I couldn't believe it. The idea came, more or less then, to write a piece of music for each window, but it was two years before we started recording anything."

Lumina is a departure for Duignan in more ways than one. As well as taking the windows as his inspiration, he sought to trace the journey of the spirit from birth to death and rebirth, just as Clarke had illustrated with such intensity in his stained glass. The primal forces of light and colour could only benefit from the addition of sound, according to Duignan. "First of all, I was blown away by the colours and the detail, the images that you just wouldn't expect to find in a church," he explains. "As I looked at them I realised that they were depicting the life of Christ, but I figured you could take it on a broader level and bring in the life cycle, the journey of the spiritual life."

Duignan's preparation for the album coincided with the arrival of his father-in-law, who lived with the family until his death, last January. The natural parallel between life and music wasn't lost on Duignan. "We were watching the life leaving this man, but the fight he had to put up to leave. He had to make the decision to go. He had to let go gently. It's still a fight to let go, even at 93. He was an extraordinary man, with a great zest for life. I told him about the project, and I played a lot of the music for him."

Melding stained glass with low whistle might not be the most natural of pairings, yet Duignan was never in any doubt about the rightness of his decision. In the midst of composing the pieces his resolve was strengthened even further when he read a biography of Clarke. "The big turning point for me was discovering that Johnny Doran, the piper, was a good friend of Harry Clarke's. For me that was the green light that dispelled any doubt I had about how the recording would be accepted, how it would come across and what the reaction would be to it. I didn't have the confidence to just go for it until I read about that friendship. If Harry Clarke liked that music, then I just had to give it a go. I also had a lot of connections with Inis Oírr, and that's where Clarke and Doran used to hang out together, so that made it feel right too."

Having forged his reputation as a piper of considerable skill and subtlety, Duignan chose to abandon the instrument in favour of the low whistle for Lumina. "The low whistle is played from low down, in the diaphragm," he says. "You can get a lot of emotion into it. You can get a lot of feeling and you can tell a story very easily from deep down. You can get the sentiment and the emotion across very clearly. I have a collection of different whistles, and used them in different keys to hit different emotional spots - to reach different chakras, really. For example, on Child's Play I used the G whistle, which is a lively whistle, whereas on Letting Go I used the F whistle, which is a sweeter sound. It hasn't the same edge. That helped me to tell the story better."

The discipline of writing a conceptual suite presented Duignan with a challenge of an altogether different kind to anything he'd encountered in his previous recordings. "With my other albums I had a collection of tunes I'd written which I would record, get in a good running order and release. With this one the running order had to reflect the windows, and each piece had to flow naturally into the next, so it was a totally different approach, which was quite taxing and challenging. But in the beginning I took a little tape recorder with me into the church, and that's where I wrote a lot of the music."

Working with the producer and guitarist Gerry O'Beirne was pivotal to the album's gestation and birth. "I have Philip King to thank for making that connection for me. We worked in unison, with great harmony, and Gerry let nothing away. He is a real perfectionist and a very special man."

Bathed as Lumina is in the spiritual, Duignan admits that most of his music is bound up with his own spirituality, although he is quick to distance that from a conventional religiosity. "I'd say there's a very strong spiritual aspect to my music," he nods, "and there always has been. Lumina just gave me a chance to go deeper into it. I think it's important to see it as spiritual rather than religious. Although it's based on the life of Christ, I don't consider it to be part of any particular religious form. I was brought up a Catholic, but I'm not a practising Catholic at this stage in my life. But the story is still good. It's still powerful."

Contributors to the album include the Hothouse Flower Liam Ó Maonlaoí, the harpist Steve Coulter, the fiddle and viola player Máire Breatnach, the bassist James Blennerhassett, the clarinettist Virginia McKee and the Indian-harmonium player Jon Sanders. Not exactly a common-or-garden trad session.

"I think what's important to the music is the presence of considerate, loving and gentle people," says Duignan. "On this project I didn't have to tell the musicians what it was about: they sensed it. All I would say to them was to just go and look at the windows. They'd come out and they were in awe, and then we would go to work. Simple as that."

Lumina is available from www.duigo.com