Series’ appeal no mystery

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks in Winnipeg for new Canadian music.

Less than a week after the Winnipeg New Music Festival’s finale, another romp through Canadian orchestral sounds greets Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s audiences tonight.

This time, in a poppier key, with Murdoch Mysteries in Concert.

“It’s a concept that was developed a few years ago where we thought, what if we took an episode of television and created a live experience?” says Murdoch’s composer Rob Carli.

“It’s so rare that we get to see episodes with an audience, and it really is suited to a live audience,” adds Daniel Maslany, who plays Det. Llewellyn Watts on the show and hosts the concert with Carli and conductor Lucas Waldin.

While everyone’s talking about the Canuck hit Heated Rivalry right now, Murdoch Mysteries has been the tried-and-true constant of Canadian TV for the past 19 years, and now airs in more than 150 countries.

Part throwback to the light episodic whodunits of yesteryear — think Columbo or Murder, She Wrote — Murdoch Mysteries is also quintessentially Canadian, with its Edwardian Toronto setting and revolving door of Canadian guest stars, such as Chris Hadfield and William Shatner.

It’s refreshingly original in other ways, too.

The classic detective story, pioneered by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle, is a product of its era, the industrial revolution.

The arch-rational detective is confronted with a mysterious crime, cuts through others’ superstitious explanations of it, catches the wily criminal and restores order over urban chaos.

Murdoch Mysteries’ is more broadminded — navigating troubled urban conditions not just like scientific cops, but a little like sociologists. While loyal to its fun sources, it thinks a touch more “intersectionally” about poverty, race and other social issues. It too is a product of its era.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of period whimsy. One of Murdoch’s conceits is that its main protagonist, the hunky Det. William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) often invents tools— crude prototypes of sonar, fax and so on — to assist in investigations.

His deductive mind is as fine as Sherlock’s — though the eccentric Det. Watts, Maslany’s character, serves occasionally as his foil, bringing his own style to the cases at hand.

Given the series’ closed-case, episodic format and 19-year span, that’s a heck of a lot of cases closed — back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest about 300.

At Murdoch Mysteries in Concert, audiences will get to see one of those mysteries solved as the WSO accompanies a screening of Murder in F Major, known as a fan-favourite episode.

But the program is more than this — an exploration of Murdoch’s world and how music serves to propel the show’s fast-paced storytelling.

“Imagine watching a three-minute scene with no music in it. You really understand, like, ‘Wow, this is very dry,’ and then we slowly build a cue around it,” says Carli.

“We start with the melodies and motifs, then build the orchestra — low strings, higher strings, winds, brass, percussion — and then put it all together.”

Being a Canadian composer isn’t an easy job. It’s not just that there are increasingly fewer academic posts and opportunities on Canada’s stages for composers (though the Winnipeg New Music Festival, one of North America’s première festivals of new orchestral music, helps to counter this), there’s also a stigma attached to contemporary classical and orchestral music — often stereotyped as inaccessible, overly intellectual and ugly.

While this can’t be said for Carli’s scores, the composer talks about how much more accepting audiences can be of adventurous sounds within film and TV if it supports drama and suspense.

“There’s a scene — I’ll break it down in the in the first half of the show — where I’m using a lot of modern string techniques, a lot of, sort of, atonal writing. You don’t even notice it when you’re watching the shows because it’s part of the story,” he says.

“It’s like album artwork or a music video. I feel like we are visual people in the way that we take in art,” Maslany adds.

Murdoch Mysteries in Concert has toured with symphony orchestras to Toronto, Edmonton, Halifax, Victoria, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Regina — and the Winnipeg performance may sell out.

This doesn’t seem surprising for a show, which started on Citytv in 2008, then moved to CBC in 2012, that’s spent nearly two decades winning over Canadians.

“This is a uniquely Canadian product, and the fact that it’s not only that, but a television show, is something special,” Carli says.

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