Dolores Claman - Deep in the jungle of jingles

Deep in the jungle of jingles

By MURRAY CHARTERS
BrandfordExpositor.ca
June 21, 2008

CBC Radio has always played a big part in my life, particularly Radio 2. I love the variety, the unexpected hearing of old favourites and things never heard before, the sometimes perceptive comments of the announcers, and especially the fact that I have been able to listen to it most of the time while driving to all sorts of places in this huge country.

Lately CBC has been making some decisions about its future programming which annoy me and maybe a few others, but the one decision that has caught the world's attention and upset many Canadians everywhere is the release of the theme song for Hockey Night in Canada. CTV has cleverly grabbed the tune some describe as Canada's second anthem, so we'll be hearing lots more of it. But what exactly are we hearing?

This tune was created in 1968 in Scarborough by Dolores Claman. Claman was born into a musical family in Vancouver in 1927. She seemed to have a good ear from an early age, imitating the songs her mother still sang from a pre-marriage career singing operetta with touring companies. Claman studied piano as a youngster and went on to study music and drama at the University of Southern California before attending prestigious Juilliard on a fellowship. Her composing skills had already caught the ear of baritone Lawrence Tibbett, and soon she was composing ballets and musical comedies.

Claman went to England in 1953 and wrote music for several productions in London's West End. She married an English writer, Richard Morris, and after they moved to Toronto in 1958 they quickly became one of Canada's most successful teams writing commercial jingles. In fact, during the next 30 years they wrote more than 3.000 jingles and won more than 40 international awards. Claman and Morris also provided scores for many musicals and movies of the time.

It was probably their music for the Oscar-winning film for the Ontario Pavilion in Expo 67, A Place to Stand, including the hit theme song Ontar-iar-i-ar-i-o. which encouraged McClaren Advertising to ask her to provide a jingle for the hockey show they were working on under director Ralph Mellanby for CBC-TV. Mellanby liked what he heard but he had to convince corporate sponsors Molson, Imperial Oil and Ford, all of which doubted its potential.

In fact Mellanby liked it so much he suggested offering her $15,000 to buy the song outright. But it was just a commercial jingle that would typically be used for two or three years and then be replaced, so Claman's tune earned her a one-time creative fee of $800.

She retained rights to the song as her creation, but there was no licensing arrangement so there were no royalties. The 20 unionized musicians in the orchestra that recorded her song for CBC's use, however, get paid every time their version of her song aired.

Then the song began to catch on, and went from an advertising jingle to the theme of Hockey Night in Canada in the early 1970s. CBC began paying Claman standard music-use licensing payments, averaging about $4,000 a year. But after 20 years of this, Claman was advised by a copyright advocate in 1993 to personally license her piece and from then on, she received about $500 for each show. Since HNIC usually appears many times a year, this added up to annual incomes from $30,000 up to $65,000.

Now all that has come to an end. A lump-sum payment by CTV to own the music outright is going to the creative personality who now lives in London, England and will be 81 next month. Some have questioned why CBC should have been paying out so much of taxpayers' money for this little ditty , while others have wailed about the loss of this national icon.

The term "jingle" indicates something much less, yet much more, than all this. Meant as a put-down reference to verses that rhyme as tritely as the repetitive ringing of something metallic such as your keys, jingle now suggests words and music that are so virulently infectious you can't find an antidote to get them out of your brain. Say "United Furniture Warehouse" and tell me you don't hear a deep bass voice and certain rhythms and pitches. Think Mission: Impossible and tell me you don't hear another sound, now purely instrumental, plus a rhythm and set of pitches.

These are not accidents but the careful work of musicians who applied their talents to something shorter than the Beethoven symphonies -- which have also furnished a number of these "earworms." For Beethoven we have the fancy word "motif," but calling Claman's work a mere jingle ignores the fact that this is a logo in sound, and we all know the power of logos these days.

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