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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.

It leads us into and out of most commercials on NBC’s telecasts, right after or before the announcers become preternaturally excited about a U.S. athlete winning bronze. In other words, we hear the tune a whole heck of a lot during this 2016 Summer Festival of Television Advertising Occasionally Interrupted by Performances of Sport.

But 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.

The Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics have already had some superb musical moments, plus they inspired Katy Perry to release her first new song in a few years. Perry’s
“Rise,” the latest in a long line of Olympic-inspired up-and-at-’em pop schmaltz, does earn points for the lyric, “I must stay conscious,” perhaps the most useful sports advice ever given a backbeat.

But Friday’s opening ceremony had the good grace to showcase some of the gems from the 1960s Brazilian musical canon, tunes both graceful as a feather and memorable as your child’s birthdate.

The one everybody recognized and was talking about is “Girl from Ipanema,” in part because the event planners had Gisele Bundchen walk across the Maracana Stadium floor to it. (Historical note: The supermodel Bundchen is not from Ipanema, a Rio neighborhood and beach, but from the south of Brazil.)

But there was more than “Ipanema.” The ceremony on NBC began with a music video for the exquisite “Aquele Abraco” (“The Embrace”), Gilberto Gil’s late ’60s love song to a troubled Rio.

And when the action moved to the stadium floor, as the dancers covered in foil performed a sort of baked-potato bossa nova, we heard a tantalizing musical excerpt from the verse of “Summer Samba,” popularized in English, as “So Nice,” by the likes of Andy Williams and Astrud Gilberto.

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As in every Olympics, however, that telecast theme song is the dominant music. It is potent on its own, as a call to glory, and as a symbol: of the Olympics, of our childhoods, of a time when we didn’t watch the events and think about doping.

The tune 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.

Earlier, I went with the simple “da — DA — da-da-da — DA-da.” A writer for Smithsonian.com in 2014 offered the more complex, “BUM—BUM—ba-ba-ba-BAH-BAH.” Either way, Ds or Bs, you fill in how it really sounds in your own head.

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 couple of times on radio by Dr. Demento?

If you know, please email me with your information, at the address just below, and I will follow up. I am trusting that out there, on the internet or around the breakfast tables of the greater Chicago region, exist people who have managed to retain this obscure fact.

And once we know, we can all of us, in our living rooms, let those words ring out, right before another Procter & Gamble ad.

[email protected]
Twitter @StevenKJohnson

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