"The Hockey Theme" is a Canadian piece of theme music written in 1968 by Dolores Claman and orchestrated by Jerry Toth.[1] It is widely recognized as Canada's unofficial second national anthem.[2][3][4][5]
The theme was associated with CBC Television's Hockey Night in Canada, and Télévision de Radio-Canada's La Soirée du hockey from 1968 until 2002 on French broadcasts when the CBC lost its rights to broadcast NHL games in French and RDS aired a simulcast of Le Hockey du samedi soir, and in 2008 for English broadcasts when the CBC announced that the negotiations to renew their licence or purchase the theme had been unsuccessful and that they would run a national contest to find a new theme. The rights were then purchased by rival broadcaster CTVglobemedia (now known as Bell Media) in perpetuity. Since 2008, the theme could be heard on hockey broadcasts on the Bell Media-owned TSN and RDS sports networks.
History
Origins
In 1968, the CBC commissioned McLaren Advertising to create a new promotional tune for Hockey Night in Canada.[6] McLaren contracted Dolores Claman, a classically trained composer who had produced a number of successful jingles, promotional songs and television theme music,[7] to write the tune. Claman had never seen a hockey game in person and wrote the tune imagining Roman gladiators wearing skates. "It just arrived in my head", she recalled several decades later. Claman said she wrote it to reflect the narrative arc of a hockey game from the arrival on the rink, to the battle of the game, to the trip home, "plus a cold beer."[8] Since the song was originally classified as an advertising jingle Claman did not originally get residuals but only a one-time creative fee of $800. The piece was originally performed by a 20-member orchestra.
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