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."
Her song, which was adopted as the theme of CBC's Saturday Hockey Night in Canada broadcast, went on to become one of the country's most recognizable commercial tunes, but until this week, when rival network CTV bought it for an amount estimated at more than $1-million, it never made her more than a modest income.
"I am not a jet-set lady," she said. "I don't even own a car."
Ms. Claman's payoff is the coda to one of the strangest and most emotional battles in Canadian business history. By last week, she and the CBC were locked in what amounted to a game of chicken.
On Friday, the broadcaster announced that it couldn't come to terms with Ms. Claman, and will hold a national song-writing competition to find a new theme for Hockey Night in Canada.
On Monday came stunning news: CTV had bought Ms. Claman's song, and will use it as the centrepiece of its hockey coverage. Most fans hailed the move, but there are some dissenters; one fan compared it to selling The Star Spangled Banner to China.
For Ms. Claman, the sale is a welcome end to years of wrangling with the CBC, and is dollars-and-cents confirmation of her song's place in the national imagination. "I'm really glad that people care about it. It's been a long, hard road."
CTV will not say how much it paid for the song, but sources said the bid far exceeded $1-million. (Ms. Claman said yesterday that the CBC's top offer was approximately $850,000.)
For Ms. Claman, commercial vindication was long in coming. She composed the Hockey Night in Canada theme in 1968, on contract for a Toronto advertising firm. Because the song was classified as an advertising jingle, she did not get residuals. Instead, she was paid a one-time creative fee of $800. Her composition was performed by a 20-member orchestra; ironically, the musicians were paid union rates each time the song was used on air.
In the early 1970s, Ms. Claman's music was reclassified as a "theme" after the CBC began using it as the standard introduction to Hockey Night in Canada, meaning that she was entitled to music-use licence payments. She said the CBC paid between $2,000 and $10,000 each year. She believes the average was about $4,000. That changed in 1993, after she connected with Toronto agent John Ciccone, who advised her to license the song. After that, she was paid approximately $500 per broadcast, yielding a gross annual income estimated at $30,000 to $45,000.
Ms. Claman was born in Vancouver and won a scholarship to New York's prestigious Juilliard School of Music as a teenager. She later founded a commercial music company in Toronto with her husband, a British lyricist, and wrote more than 2,000 jingles and theme songs. She said yesterday she had no idea the hockey song she composed 40 years ago in her Scarborough living room would last so long.
"It just arrived in my head," she said. She wanted her song to reflect the narrative arc of hockey itself: the arrival at the rink, the battle on the ice, then the trip home, "plus a cold beer."
Ms. Claman said she employed an old advertising-business trick when she submitted her song. She actually composed two: the dunt-da-DUNT-da-dunt theme, plus a second one that she knew CBC executives and advertisers would reject.
"You have to make them feel like they had a choice. That's how the business works."