“An Entire Sacred Effort”: Hymnody and Mythopoetics in John Williams’s Score for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012)

Abstract

John Williams’s score to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) offered the composer unique opportunities to explore an American-associated hymn style and topic, and his own patriotism. By examining precedents of the composer’s hymn style and through close analysis of themes and cues, this article investigates how Williams’s patriotism influenced the score, how it is distanced from the Coplandesque frame used to commonly categorize film music that signifies the American, and how hymns function to shape audioviewers’ reception of Lincoln . It presents Williams as a composer of America rather than a composer for film by arguing that Williams’s historically fantasized hymns functioned to deify Lincoln , to support a reverential attitude to the past within and beyond the film, and thus that his score reveals a personal patriotic imperative to serve both film and country. After a preliminary survey of the hymn topic within Williams’s oeuvre, the article’s first section establishes musical aesthetic functionality, defining and analyzing the hymn style to demonstrate mythopoetic function and reveal stylistic heritage. The second section contextualizes Williams’s musical simplicity with reference to aesthetic currents of American music history and the concerns for authenticity during film production. The final section presents a reading of the film’s sentimental finale, discussing how the coda reveals the wider purpose and positionality of Williams’s score through the lens of musical mythopoetics.