As is well known, the classical Titchmarsh–Weyl m-function for second order differential operators admits a generalisation to considerably larger classes of differential equations. In the applications, however, the use of the general M-matrix often turns out to be rather cumbersome. The paper interprets the m-function in terms of Hilbert space notions, and shows that, in a sense that is made precise, the classical m-function can be recovered as a part of the more complicated one. Applications of this trick lead to results on spectral multiplicity and on stability properties of the spectrum.