When two artistic forms collide, or mate, something new is born. It can be exhilarating or awful: in the bad corner a novelist's work is traduced on screen, or a classical tune mangled by a pop remix. In the good corner a fine novel emerges from a Vermeer painting, Verdi makes music of Othello and Carl Giles's cartoon Grandma turns up as a bronze by Miles Robinson, improving Ipswich no end.

I had never thought much about this until a letter came a year ago from Joseph Phibbs, a young composer whose Lumina caught attention when it was given its premiere at the Last Night of the Proms and whose work has since been broadcast by Radio 3 and performed across Europe and America. He wrote that he had been commissioned to write a song cycle for soprano and string quartet, to have its premiere in Nelson's church at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, for the bicentenary of the great sailor's birth. The loose theme was the sea and youth.

Somebody had shown him our son Nicholas's book The Silence at the Song's End, and Phibbs wanted permission to use the poems in the book as his lyrics. Our son, who took his life at 23, had crossed the Pacific as a deckhand on the square-rigged ship Europa and held for all his life a romantic sensibility about the sea; images and metaphors from it fill the poems.

As editor and as parents we immediately said yes, though with a faint sense of vertigo. Cautious research into Phibbs's work suggested that we would probably not understand the music at all, given that one of his teachers was Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

I find much serious contemporary music fairly inaccessible (though I do love Tavener). But that was actually part of the satisfaction: the idea that, although he himself would never write again, our son's words had inspired new work in a developing culture that might stretch beyond our understanding. Art has to go onward and outward, just as children do, into a future of different sensibilities and ideas.

We told Phibbs this several times over the summer, when he politely visited and contacted us, asking with great delicacy whether we approved the order (non-chronological) in which he was putting the poems, and whether we minded one being cut into two sections. We kept telling him not to worry, go for it, do what he had to do. He sent us a score; neither of us read music. Again we told him not to consider our feelings.

He wrote a short introduction for the programme, explaining that he felt the poems ideal for setting to music “not least through the language: transparent yet intensely lyrical, often suggestive rather than literal, timeless yet vitally of the present... I came to view my chosen sequence as a psychological drama or journey.” So it was.

Then came the night of the premiere. We went to the quiet country church where the young Nelson, orphaned at 9, would have prayed for his mother's soul, and where he returned in mid-life despair as a half-pay officer. I have always found it a poignant spot. The young performers, the Solstice Quartet, played a Haydn piece. Then, for the song cycle, the remarkable Irish soprano Sylvia O'Brien came among them.

I have to be careful with emotional language here: but others there on that night confirm the extraordinary impact of the work: wild, strange, lyrical (not, in some ways, that far from Tavener). O'Brien's voice is echoingly pure, and her ability to deal with this kind of music well honed by many contemporary roles since her Governess in Britten's The Turn of the Screw.

But it was the fidelity, the closeness of the music and feeling to the words that knocked us sideways. Phibbs opens out the emotion of the poems almost unbearably. The cycle begins with the stately, floridly Elizabethan sonnet “O let the hour of fantasy dissolve...”, written on his ship in the Pacific and ending: “O gallop on wild horses of the night/ For even you may glimpse eternal light.”

Later came a savage, rapid outburst about A levels (“Caffeine storm/ Beating brain/ Pure heart torn/ Torn again”). Then more lyrical moments, two sad love poems and a final lost poem about the act of writing itself, found after the book was published. It ends: “Recapture the dead/ A mere thread/ Delicate and slight/ Let it remain/ And let it be brighter than its paper stain.”

For the last song Phibbs takes the title poem with its resolved Wordsworthian ending averring that “The silence at the song's end, before the next, is the world”. Here a triple repetition of “is the world”, sung on a bewildered dying fall, expressed for us at least the core truth about the strange mind that wrote the words: a young man whose exalted mysticism and terrifying demons made him unable, in his mind unfit, to bear the compromise and mess of the daily world.

So we did, in the end, understand the music. Still can't read the score; still suspect that there is more within it than we appreciate. But it is brighter than its paper stain, and we think and hope that this arresting composition will go on, and echo in other hearts.

The Silence at the Song's End by Joseph Phibbs, words by Nicholas Heiney, will be performed again by the Solstice Quartet and Sylvia O'Brien at the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on Friday at 1pm

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