Barrington Pheloung and Inspector Morse

Synopsis

Australian composer Barrington Pheloung’s music might not be familiar to concertgoers, but if you watch public television’s Mystery series, you’ve probably heard a lot of his work.

He composed music for the British Inspector Morse TV series, chronicling the cases of a Thames Valley police inspector and his loyal assistant, Robbie Lewis, and once explained how he came up with the haunting Inspector Morse theme:

“Morse is a very melancholic character ... and he was a lover of classical music ... He has a very cryptic mind and loves doing crosswords; we came up with the obvious idea — his name is Morse and so we used Morse code in the [theme] music.” He said the tapped code for M-O-R-S-E created a rhythm and even suggested a harmonic structure: “I picked up my guitar and there was the tune.”

Pheloung was born on today’s date in 1954 in Sydney, Australia, played drums and guitar as a kid, discovered Bach as a teen, and ended up earning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. He composed music for dance, films and TV, including Lewis, the sequel to the successful Inspector Morse series.

Music Played in Today's Program

Barrington Pheloung (1954-2019): Theme from Inspector Morse; The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra; James Fitzpatrick, conductor; Silva Screen Records 4729

On This Day

Births

• 1697 - French violinist and composer Jean Marie Leclair, in Lyons

• 1888 - Austrian-born American film composer Max Steiner, in Vienna

• 1894 - Russian-born American film composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, in St. Petersburg

• 1916 - American composer Milton Babbitt, in Philadelphia

Deaths

• 1760 - German composer Johann Christoph Graupner, 77, in Darmstadt

Premieres

• 1876 - Wagner: Festival March (commissioned for the American Centennial), at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, conducted by Theodore Thomas

• 1894 - R. Strauss: opera Guntram, in Weimar at the Hoftheater, with the composer conducting

• 1904 - Alfvén: Midsommarvaka (Midsummer Vigil), in Stockholm

• 1907 - Dukas: opera Ariane et Barbe-Blue (Ariane and Bluebeard), in Paris

• 1954 - Rautavaara: A Requiem in Our Time, in Cincinnati, with Cincinnati Brass Choir, Ernest N, Glover, conducting. This work had won First Prize in the Thor Johnson Composition Contest that year.

• 1957 - Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 2, in Moscow, by the USSR State Symphony, Nikolai Anosov conducting, with the composer’s son, Maxim, as the soloist

• 1964 - Roy Harris: Epilogue to ‘Profiles in Courage’ for orchestra, in Los Angeles

  1985 - Peter Maxwell Davies: An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise for orchestra with bagpipe solo, ay Boston’s Symphony Hall, by the Boston Pops conducted by John Williams

• 1985 - Michael Torke: Ecstatic Orange, at the Cooper Union in New York, by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Lukas Foss conducting

• 1997 - Philip Glass: opera The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four and Five (based on the sci-fi novel by Doris Lessing), at the State Theater in Heidelberg (Germany)

Others

• 1824 - American premiere of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro (sung in English) at the Park Theater in New York