Morse on the Case - Pheloung

Context and style

• NAM 46 is taken from an episode of Inspector Morse, a series of television detective mysteries first broadcast between 1987 and 2000
• Title and incidental music was written by Pheloung
• Large amount of material was needed over the course of 33 two-hour episodes
• Diegtic music needed to be included - the classical CDs and operas the detective plays and sees
• To avoid detracting from this music and to distinguish the diegetic extracts from his own underscore, Pheloung adopts an unintrusive style based on slow-moving lines, thin textures and single notes to reflect Morse's complex intellectual reasoning
• Avoids the cliches of film music
• In NAM 46, Pheloung uses the understated textures and ambient sounds characteristic of much Postmodernist music
• Unlike the short, repetitive ideas of Minimalism he avoids obvious rhythmic and melodic patterns
• Focuses on texture and timbre
• Meditative, sensory mood is further enhanced by quiet dynamics and long, sustained notes that change in unexpected parts of the bar
• No obvious sense of pulse, despite the constant 4/4 metre

Structure and Tonality

• Structure of the music would have been determined by the images that it accompanies, but it falls into 3 main sections, determined by instrumentation and tonality:
• Bar 1-52 for horns, piano and upper strings, entirely diatonic in the aeolian mode and overlapping with the start of...
• Bars 49-97 for oboe, piano and upper strings, in which the chromatic notes F# and Ab appear
• Bars 98-112 for all nine instruments, which gravitate towards C major but retain a persistent dissonant F#, like an unsolved clue in Morse's mind

Commentary: Bars 1-52

• Extract begins with a thin, two-part texture
• The opening intervals played by the piano are each reversed in direction by unison muted strings - the piano rises a 4th, the strings fall a 4th, the piano falls a third, the strings rise a 3rd
• Strings continue this very slow pattern of descending 4ths and rising 3rds below the piano fragments in bars 8-12
• Horns enter on an A in bar 12 and descend a tone to G in bar 15
• First violin again responds by reversing the directionb of this major 2nd, moving up a tone from C to D in bar 18

• At the end of bar 17, the piano announces a three-note melodic cell (D-E-A) followed by just its first two notes played harmonically
• Again, the first violin responds by reversing the direction of the original rising interval, once more…