UNLESS you believe in the guiding hand of Fate - perhaps in this case aided and abetted by the Muses -- Ian Wilson's presence in Leitrim seems pretty arbitrary. Seeking a change of scenery and a move away from the relative smallness of musical circles in Northern Ireland, the Belfast composer decided last summer that he and his family would settle somewhere in the Republic. If Leitrim, a rural and disadvantaged county in the north west, was not at the top of his list nowhere was, because there was no list. Anywhere was fine, so long as it was south of the border. He conveyed this to friends, asking them to keep an eye out for suitable accommodation. It was an artist friend who suggested Leitrim and mentioned hearing good things about the county's dynamic new arts officer.

In Ian Wilson, Terre Duffy saw an opportunity to emulate Stephen Gardner's ground-breaking composer residency last year with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, one of the outer Dublin local authorities. Duffy sold the idea to the Council and invited Wilson for a residency to run from February to June of this year. Wilson, plus partner Danijela Kulezic and their son Adam, moved into a house 'with a beautiful view' outside Carrick-on-Shannon last August.

The residency includes the commissioning of a new string quartet to be premiered next August by the artists-in-residence in neighbouring Sligo, the Vogler Quartet. Wilson will also embark on a six-week project in secondary schools in Carrick-on-Shannon and Mohill. His plan is to guide the students as they compose their own music, possibly using ideas from the new string quartet as starting points. Finally, in conjunction with council policy on audience development, Wilson will give a series of four workshops in each of five locations around the county. These will provide an introduction to classical music and are intended to increase public interest in classical concerts. Wilson will devote one session each to music of the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and twentieth century periods, including in his musical illustrations works from the programmes of upcoming concerts by the Irish Chamber Orchestra and the Vogler Quartet.

Leitrim County Council's press release announcing the residency opens with a pithy artistic credo. 'The arts' it says, 'have a special and unique way of enriching people's lives.' It is a view shared by Ian Wilson, who regards his Leitrim residency as an opportunity to help guide people towards a kind of enrichment through music which they might otherwise be missing. He believes that apprehension about the unknown is one of the main obstacles preventing more people from engaging with classical music. Removing that obstacle is one of his main objectives.

'All that people need is a bit of confidence', says Wilson. 'A bit of awareness of music's potential for self-expression. At the end of the day, I think that people rarely get an opportunity for the kind of self-expression that a lot of composers or visual artists experience. As well as being an interesting way to make a living, it's kind of therapeutic as well, just to be able to get your feelings and your worries out in a piece of music or on a canvas or whatever. Large swathes of the population don't get that opportunity.'

For Wilson, this belief in music's therapeutic properties, for both composer and listener, is born of extreme, first-hand experience. This was the experience of living in Belgrade, where he had settled in 1998 with his Serbian partner, Danijela, during the war in Kosovo. In March last year, after three days of NATO bombing, Wilson and his family left Belgrade for good. The experience left its mark on his creative output and was a preoccupying force in the writing of two large-scale works now due to be premiered within the next twelve months. The first is History is vanity for solo organ, commissioned by the National Concert Hall where it will be premiered by Gerard Gillen on June 22nd next. Wilson describes it as 'very strong, very dark'.

'They (the NCH) presented it as a millennium commission. I remember in my submission for the competition saying that it would be looking forward and looking back at the same time. But when it came to the writing of it, I was more reflecting on everything that happened. It partially touched on what went on in Kosovo. I got really angry about celebrating a millennium when, from one point of view, you'd think we've actually learnt very little from the last century, with all the barbarism that goes on. Not just from little Hitlers like Milosevic, but big bullies like NATO.'

Wilson laughs, checking himself lest his typically laid-back manner give way to a rush of residual anger. 'It's just an angry little piece', he says with a nonchalance he clearly does not feel. He describes how the NCH Education and Outreach officer, Lucy Champion, would like him to give a workshop on the piece prior to the performance. 'In my darkest days I imagined some kind of political tirade coming from me!' He laughs again. 'But I've calmed down a lot now so it won't be that bad.'

I put it to him that living through three days of NATO bombing would surely entitle anyone to a political tirade. But it seems that the harrowing experience only deepened his preference for the healing power of creativity over the aggressive energy of politics.

'I never felt that my life was out of my hands so much as when we were there. Just a feeling of total helplessness. In my own naïvety I remember thinking, 'Well, they'll never bomb a European city'. Just completely naïve in the ways of the world, really. We had to leave behind what we couldn't carry. We're hoping to go back for a week in May, and maybe a bit longer in September. But we won't go back to live there because the country's ruined. Unnecessarily ruined, that's the worst thing. If the British and Americans had really been so serious about those peace talks, they would have spent the same effort as they spend on the Northern Ireland peace talks and the Middle East peace talks. Instead they say, 'You've got two weeks to make your minds up or we bomb you'. It makes me sick to my bones. Anyway, the organ piece kind of got that out of my system. That and the violin concerto.'

Wilson has in fact composed two violin concertos in the past eighteen months, the first a commission from RTÉ to be premiered by Catherine Leonard with the National Symphony Orchestra in January 2001. It's called Messenger and, like History is vanity, its driving force was Wilson's experience of living in Belgrade.

'That's one of the things about being able to express yourself through music. It's cathartic. But also, I never wanted more, in a piece of music, to communicate my feelings about something. It's kind of an exorcism. I started to write it in October of 1998, just before we came back to Belfast for Adam to be born, when there was a threat of NATO bombing the first time. It tries to capture that sense of tension and anxiety. The second movement is a lullaby for Adam, trying to create the kind of little world that I want for him. The third movement is trying to capture the need to get on with living, and the last movement is a lament for Belgrade itself. People may think I'm coloured here in my attitude to Kosovo. It's not true: I think what went on there was terrible. But I also felt very much that ordinary Serbs were victimised by the world media, not to mention by a number of politicians. I felt for that city, which had become my home and which I love very much. We miss it, and it will never be the same for us.

'The thing about writing a big piece like this first violin concerto is that it's quite draining of a certain part of your compositional personality. I can't go back and do something like that for a certain amount of time. Rich Harbour, the organ concerto, was a piece in that kind of mould, which was really trying to dig deep emotionally. And the third quartet which I wrote a few years later would be another. They're spaced out, those pieces which for me are kind of heavy duty. And that's why I love so much to write pieces which are all about colour and being, as a kind of counterbalance to those other pieces.' Into this latter category goes the second violin concerto, to be premiered by Rebecca Hirsch and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the Cheltenham Festival in July. Its title is An angel serves a small breakfast after a painting by Paul Klee, and Wilson describes it as 'a little fifteen-minute piece that's very much about lightness and textures and colour: much more abstract'.

In May, Wilson begins a three-year research fellowship at his alma mater, the University of Ulster. 'The final thrust of the research will be to write a chamber opera, and I'll spend the last year and a half doing that. On the way I'll be writing two music theatre pieces and a concertante piece for bass clarinet and ensemble. It all ties in: the music theatre pieces are exploring dramatic music, writing on a smaller scale before I write the actual chamber opera; and the concertante piece is using the same kind of ensemble that the chamber opera will use.

'I've been talking about doing an opera for the last year, with a libretto by the English poet Lavinia Greenlaw. We have very similar ideas about what opera should be, which is quite distinct from what others think opera should be.'

For Wilson, whose music provides him with a means of dealing with experience, opera is a poetic medium. He cites Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle and Dallapiccola's Il Prigionero as among his favourites: concise, dramatic and poetic. He is no great fan of verismo. 'Since opera creates a false world, you may as well heighten its symbolic value rather than try to cod audiences into thinking it's the real world with singing.'

For now, Ian Wilson's real world is Ireland's north west where, if healing is still needed, he may well find it as he brings art and creativity to Leitrim's people and school children.