By Steve Johnson
Chicago Tribune
Like presidential elections and property tax reassessments, it happens every four years. Athletes from around the world gather, Americans suddenly decide to care about the pommel horse, and I get that Olympic theme music marching around in my headspace.
You know the tune I mean: da — DA — da-da-da — DA-da.
There is a whopping misconception (or two) about that theme song, and there is, to my mind, one great, enduring mystery associated with it, as well.
That song is the dominant music of the Olympics. It is so well known by now, so etched in the collective American conscience, that trying to type it out phonetically in a piece of writing, a thing that almost never works for music, actually does.
A thing many people do not seem to know about that piece of music, however, is who wrote it. There’s an apparently widespread misbelief that it is another in the John Williams line of musical notation for big cultural moments.
That’s only a little bit true. On those occasions when NBC stays with the song long enough, over 45 seconds, you do get to the major contribution from Williams, the composer of the “Star Wars” film score, etc.
But the first and main ear candy part is “Bugler’s Dream,” part of a 1958 musical suite by Leo Arnaud, a Frenchman who worked for decades, like Williams, as a film composer in Hollywood.
ABC popularized “Bugler’s Dream” with its Olympic telecasts beginning in 1968 (and on “Wide World of Sports”). When NBC took over broadcasting the games, beginning with Seoul in 1988, it first tried to use other theme music, but by Barcelona in 1992 it had succumbed to the inevitable: “Bugler’s Dream” was the Olympics.
In the meantime, Williams had written “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” for the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, a piece that incorporates his arrangement of “Bugler’s Dream” at the outset. That is what NBC uses now.
But, wait, there’s more. Music historian and composer Robert Greenberg says, on his website, that Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream” is “pure larceny, based almost note-for-note” on a cavalry call, “Salut aux etendards” (“Salute to the Flags”) written by French trumpet player Joseph David Buhl in the early 1800s.
“Now, as often as not, John Williams gets the credit for having written the thing,” Greenberg writes. “Jeesh.”
Jeesh, indeed. As for the mystery, it is this:
I have a memory of once hearing pretty good parody lyrics written for that music. A couple of people on the Internet also seem to have that memory, a recollection so dim I found it on, ahem, Yahoo Answers. The poster there remembered these words:
“This is the drum part,
This is the drum part,
This is the Olympic theme song.
You hear it all the time,
But you do not know the words.”
And a Yahoo Answerer (one) added this:
“The athletes walk into the stadium
Everybody cheers
And then they release the birds.”
It sounds sort of right to me. But I cannot find more details, especially the key one, the source of those lyrics. Was it a TV comedy show? An unreleased Weird Al track? Something played a on radio by Dr. Demento?
If you know, please email me with your information, sajohnsonchicagotribune.com.
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