Malcolm Lindsay's new album, After the Snow, is not only an object of beauty - its packaging designed by his partner Melanie Sims and lavishly decorated with photography by Brian Griffin and Margaret Watkins - its release has actually proved uncannily well-timed on a number of fronts.

The most pertinent of these is the presence of the voice of Dr Martin Luther King Jr on the piece My Duty at the heart of the middle of the three "suites" on the disc. The composer secured the permission of the estate of Dr King to use his sampled rhetoric with his score for strings - powerful stuff in which the preacher talks of himself in the third person and how he wishes to be remembered - but it can only be a coincidence that it has been released just as the first King biopic, Selma, screened in UK cinemas. The strings are those of the RSNO - the disc features our national orchestra on six of its ten tracks - under the baton of Greg Lawson, the violinist and arranger whose was the musical director behind the triumphant opening concert of this year's Celtic Connections, featuring the music of the late Martyn Bennett. Lawson also plays as a member of the string quartet and piano trio on a collection that also features cellist Rudi De Groote, pianist Scott Mitchell and the singers of the Dunedin Consort. Lindsay has recruited the best talent for his project.

All of which makes After the Snow a very useful "new readers start here" guide to the music of Malcolm Lindsay - a composer whose work has found its way into the pages of The Herald for twenty years and into the ears of the public via an extensive catalogue of television and film work. His scores have soundtracked TV dramas like Whitechapel, Unforgiven and the Douglas Henshall and Emily Blunt version of Sherlock Holmes, documentary series fronted by Michael Palin and Niall Ferguson, and feature films including Blinded, Young Adam, and 16 Years of Alcohol. He is currently working on a David Evans documentary about the relationship between a Jewish human rights lawyer and two siblings with a Nazi past. It is work that he can largely accomplish in the custom-built studio in his home in Bearsden, Glasgow. He is sent a link to view the film and communicates with the filmmaker by email. "We only really ever speak if one of us is lonely," he jokes.

"The vision of the director is what is important, the emotion is laid out before you so what I am often doing is designing music rather than 'composing'," he says.

It was a year and a half ago, after many years of creating between 12 and 15 hours of TV music a year, that Lindsay decided he needed a break from the solitude of screen work. He co-wrote and produced the debut album by Heather Hind, Hindsight, and looked afresh at his own catalogue of compositions.

"I thought I'd invest some time and money - and Creative Scotland's money - in an album of considered quality. As well as some newer pieces I started to think about re-visiting previous work and soon I had a double album's worth and had to pare it down."

The resulting collection is very specific about its origins and inspiration, and skilfully combines the old and the new. The title section of the opening Remembrance Suite is one of those written for the full symphony orchestra and a response to the recollections of people who had lost friends and family in conflict in a television programme Lindsay caught as a simple viewer. It is combined with a piece for strings that took its queue from an audio recording made in Jerusalem by artist Stuart Duffin, with whom Lindsay played in the band The Moors, his Kyrie for the Dunedin Consort's People's Mass of 2002, and piano trio in memory of poet Mark Halliday and commissioned by Milngavie Music Club.

The Vision Suite begins with a piece originally commissioned by the Greenbelt Festival to precede a BBC Concert Orchestra performance of Holst's Planets, and travels via Dr King's testimony to a clarinet and electronics co-composition with Barnaby Robson inspired by story and work of Glasgow photographer Margaret Watkins. Last Words opens with a new string orchestra arrangement of Lindsay's first string quartet, which gave its title to his first album, Solitary Citizen, and then looks to literary sources for two pieces inspired by writings of Janice Galloway and Bernard MacLaverty and originally commissioned by Waterstones.

Responding in a musical way to other branches of the arts seems essential to the composer's practice even when he is not being sent images to soundscore. The written word makes an impact because he had consumed little of it. "I'm a bit dyslexic and have read maybe 20 novels in my life - and fourteen of them are by Paul Auster." Of photographers like Watkins and Griffin, whose other great album sleeve is the shot of the winkle-pickers on the cover of Joe Jackson's debut, Look Sharp, Lindsay remarks simply, "I would be a photographer if I had the skill."

But it was music that grabbed Lindsay as a young man in the North East. "I got a record player that came with a free album of Tchaikovsky. I am a very bad piano player, but I had the best music teacher in Elgin. I sang at the Mod, and then in a Benjamin Britten opera that Britten and Pears attended. The I bought a guitar and listened to Gallagher and Lyle and Julian Bream."

While the invention of midi technology made it possible for Lindsay to conceive of writing a string quartet - it remains his favourite instrumental combination and he now has 18 completed - it was the late great cellist and catalyst Kevin McCrae who "opened up the world of classical music."

"I'd boldly called the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to say I'd written a string quartet, and he said 'great, we'll do it!'"

Using new technology like Q-Base, Lindsay was able to translate his ideas into charts for the musicians, but McCrae helped him make them readable.

"For a long while I couldn't read my own scores, and they were usually awful. Now I have someone who checks them over and helps beautify them."

Away from the lonely existence of the TV composer, Lindsay has called on the contribution of some very fine friends to create the work of art that is the landscape of After the Snow. It looks and sounds like a particularly bright Spring.

After the Snow is released today on Mozie