"Seventy-Six Trombones" is a show tune and the signature song from the 1957 musical The Music Man, by Meredith Willson, a film of the same name in 1962 and a made-for-TV movie in 2003. The piece is commonly played by marching bands, military bands, and orchestras.[1] [2]
In the musical, it is the primary sales pitch for a boy's band, sung by "Professor" Harold Hill.[3] Hill uses the song to help the townspeople of River City, Iowa visualize their children playing in a marching band by claiming to recall a time when he saw several famous bandleaders' bands in a combined performance. While an average-sized high school marching band might have about 10 musicians playing the trombone, and a large college marching band seldom has more than 30 trombonists, the band that Harold Hill describes to the citizens includes 76 trombones, 110 cornets, "more than a thousand reeds", double bell euphoniums, and "fifty mounted cannon" (which were popular in bands of the late 19th century).The song's opening lines are:
Seventy-six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand ...
The love ballad "Goodnight My Someone", which immediately precedes "Seventy-Six Trombones" in the musical, has the same tune but is played in 3/4 time at a slower tempo. At the end of the musical, lines from "Seventy-Six Trombones" and "Goodnight My Someone" are sung in alternation with each other. This technique is used in opera, but was unknown in Broadway musicals.
In Willson's hometown of Mason City, Iowa, the song is honored (along with the whole plot of The Music Man) in a building called "Music Man Square", which is located next to Willson's boyhood home.[7] In one large room, there are 76 donated trombones hanging from the ceiling.
In Chile, the instrumental march version (with Leroy Anderson's orchestration) was used as a theme song for radio Portales news show La Revista de Portales. It was used because of an earlier use on the news show La bitácora en Portales.[8]