Sorry to learn of the death of Dolores Claman, who composed the rousing theme song that used to open broadcasts of CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada back when the world was younger. Born in Vancouver in 1927, she died this week in Spain at the age of 94.
Claman was trained as a concert pianist before she switched keys to dedicate herself to composing. She was working for Maclaren Advertising in Toronto when she was hired in 1968 to craft a fanfare to open the national broadcaster’s Saturday-night flagship. The theme she came up with became a proxy national anthem. It was 2008 that the Hockey Night relationship ended, in acrimony: CTV ended up buying the rights to the song after the CBC and Claman couldn’t settle a financial dispute. While Claman’s iconic theme took an early retirement on broadcasts of regional games on TSN, Hockey Night resorted to replacing it with an imperfect (and perfectly forgettable) facsimile.
From 2008, here’s the Globe and Mail’s Peter Cheney with the musical origin story:
It started on a peaceful afternoon in 1968, when Dolores Claman sat down at her Knabe grand piano and began picking at the keys, searching for a sound. Outside the window was her garden, then the blue expanse of Lake Ontario. Ms. Claman tried B-flat, then the key of C, seeking the musical essence of something she had never seen firsthand: a professional hockey game.
Ms. Claman was a classically trained musician who loved Bach, but she made her living composing jingles. She had written music for everything from toothpaste to its natural enemy, Macintosh toffee. Now she was thinking about Canada’s national sport. She pictured Roman gladiators wearing skates. Suddenly, five notes popped into her head. She tapped them out, stressing the third: “dunt-da-DUNT-da-dunt.”
Ms. Claman had no idea that she just made herself part of Canadian history — and that she had set the stage for an epic battle 40 years in the future.
“I wasn’t thinking about much at the time,” Ms. Claman, 80, said yesterday from her home in London, England. “The song wasn’t hard to do.”
puckstruck 