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.
The solo violin in Holocaust cinema functions not as a static or sentimental symbol but as a historically contingent sonic mechanism whose meaning evolves across time through specific cinematic and memorial frameworks. Through a comparative analysis of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Schindler's List (1993), and The Song of Names (2019), this study traces the violin's transformation from sentimental universalism to moral certitude to speculative absence. Synthesizing Michel Foucault's genealogical method, Michael A. Figueroa's musical adaptation of it, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski's theory of musical witnessing, it develops a hybrid framework for analyzing how sound accrues historical authority and organizes ethical orientation in Holocaust cinema, without claiming transparent access to testimony. In addition to offering a genealogy of sonic symbolism, the article proposes a periodization of Holocaust film through sound-the Normative Period, the Era of the Witness, and the Post-Witness Period-each marked by distinct listening practices and memory-making strategies. This model shifts the analytic center from visual tropes to auditory ones, treating sound as a mediated mode through which Holocaust memory is constructed, stabilized, and contested. In the Post-Witness Period especially, the violin emerges not as testimony but as a speculative, prosthetic form of witnessing whose authority derives from its circulation within institutional memory cultures. By positioning the violin as a discursive and affective site of memory work rather than an autonomous agent, the article reorients Holocaust film analysis toward the politics of sound and underscores the urgent relevance of listening as Holocaust memory becomes increasingly mediated.
Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon was a Black, queer musician active from the 1910s through the 1930s. His work is characterized by captivating transformations of both musical elements and the gender and sexual dimensions of songs. A discussion of his recording of "My Daddy Rocks Me" reveals Jaxon not only reimagining the song but also raising the voice of the sissy character in the blues and presenting queer desire as rapturous and transgressive. While studies of queer aspects of the blues have focused on female musicians like Ma Rainey, this article is the first to examine the music of a queer Black male musician.
