Jon Burlingame editorThere will be a lot of music in Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI telecast, and no, we’re not talking about the halftime show — rather, the music at the start of the show and throughout the game itself.John Williams’ “Sunday Night Football” march is expected to open the broadcast. “That’s our theme,” says Super Bowl executive producer Fred Gaudelli. “There’s a grandeur to it, an importance, that lets you know that a big game is about to begin.

And there is no bigger game than the Super Bowl.”But, Gaudelli adds, a great deal of other music will be heard as the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams take to the field, much of it in the tradition of televised sports themes dating back to the 1960s: appropriately muscular music to accompany modern-day gladiators into the arena for battle.“It’s all storytelling,” says Adam Taylor, president and CEO of APM, the production music house that supplies music to all of the networks, the National Football League and nearly every individual NFL team. “It’s really the drama, the story.

The purpose of our music is to inform storytelling, to strengthen it and capture the emotions of the moment.” APM controls “Heavy Action,” better known as the “Monday Night Football” theme still heard on ESPN but which dates back to its 1975 debut on ABC during the heyday of Howard Cosell, Keith Jackson and Don Meredith.

Its opening four notes have become synonymous with football on TV.Unlike the Williams music commissioned by NBC in 2006, “Heavy Action” wasn’t originally written with pigskin in mind.

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