Born July 6, 1927, in Vancouver, Claman started piano lessons at age six and took an early interest in composition, later scoring a fellowship to the prestigious Julliard School of Music in New York City. Her first paying gig was playing piano for a ballet school in Queens — a task she admits was “the worst [I] ever had” — but she soon found more satisfaction writing music for a play back in Vancouver called Timber!, which was also performed on CBC Radio. A trip to London, England, found her co-writing for West End musicals with American Jack Gray. But it was meeting lyricist Richard Morris there that changed the course of her history.

Claman married Morris and upon returning to Canada, the couple founded the Quartet Agency with Howard Cable and brothers Jerry and Rudy Toth in Toronto. “Richard was a fantastic lyric writer,” she recalls. “He’d worked in advertising and wrote plays and stuff. There was very little interest in buying original music for theatre or TV then, so we started a jingle business, and we got very, very busy, so we teamed up with the Toth brothers. That made a quartet.” The company produced music for such clients as CN, Air Canada, General Motors and Molson and won several ad agency awards. Those compositions are lost to time, and even Claman remembers few details. “When you’re doing to-order work, they could use something for a few months, a year, two years or four years,” she says. “I think we did some insurance thing that ran for maybe 12 years. But generally, you don’t know what’s going to happen to it, do you? It’s up to them. So I learned to let it go.”

During this time, Claman and Morris continued to write for musical theatre whenever possible. And in 1967, they were commissioned by the Government of Ontario to produce a theme for the province. The piece was called “A Place to Stand,” but most Ontarians of a certain age remember it best as the “Ontari-ari-ario” song.

“I’m always embarrassed to say 'you remember that one...' , because obviously you wouldn’t!” she says, laughing. “It was a long time ago. But that was very, very successful. They spent quite a bit of money on it, which let us do some nice things. It was for children to sing, really, and what’s interesting is that we only had about four children. We had other women who can sound like children sort of beefing them up. It’s a good idea, if you need some children singing, to have adults to keep them together.”

The tune was used in the short film A Place to Stand, which screened at Montreal’s Expo 67 and later won an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film. And so, although it was rare to find women writing music for TV at the time, Claman became one of the most sought-after composers in Canada. Then the phone rang with the offer to write a new theme for Hockey Night in Canada. The producers wanted something more adventurous and Claman — who admits she had never watched much hockey at that point – was up to the challenge.

“I thought I’d better watch some hockey, really fast!” she says. “So I did. And that’s the impression that I got, that the players were like gladiators, only they’re on ice. That’s why I wrote those sort of 'bare fists,' if you know what I mean, in the riff. I thought that sound was kind of gladiatorial.”

Commissioned as a jingle, with gaps for the announcers to plug sponsors like Imperial Oil, Ford and (of course) Molson’s, The Hockey Theme debuted on CBC-TV in 1968. Whatever sensation it originally caused was somewhat lost on Claman, who had by then moved to Spain with Richard Morris. (“We were burnt out,” she admits.) It would be years before she realized its true impact and by then, she had relocated to London. There she would be spared hearing various updated arrangements broadcast throughout the years – including an electronic version that lasted just one season. Claman’s favourite remains the original swinging version orchestrated by Jerry Toth – which she wanted to make available. But when they went looking for the master recording, it was lost.

“We couldn’t find it anywhere,” she says. “We didn’t have it. Jerry Toth didn’t have it. The studio didn’t have it.” And so in 2002, Claman and her new business partner John Ciccone of Copyright Music and Visuals (who had successfully negotiated her publishing rights for The Hockey Theme in the 1990s and remains her MVP) reassembled in a Toronto studio to re-record the 1968 theme.

“We got 20-some musicians in the studio in Toronto and Rick Wilkins recreated it,” she says. “He listened to the original and got as close as possible and we did it again. There were three musicians that actually were on the original. I think the others either moved away or died. But it was really nice.”

More recently, Claman has continued to create music. She has updated some older musicals she once co-wrote with Morris (now her ex-husband) for cabaret dinner theatres – even penning her own lyrics. “They’re a bit quirky with black humour,” she says. Still, she can’t escape the legacy of her most famous composition.

“It’s funny,” she says. “I was hoping that I might hear it someday, on a bus in London or something. Because so many people do have it as a ringtone. I think nearly half a million have been sold. But I don’t think it works over here. If it did, I’d love one.”