Film Score Analysis of John Williams Lincoln

Lincoln is the twenty-sixth collaboration between John Williams and Steven Spielberg. In Lincoln John Williams composes a score that is soft and inconspicuous. This technique does not reduce the musical expression of the score – it strengthens it. The score played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra contains strong American influence. While there are only a few scenes in which viewers can hear diegetic music – the opening scene has a fife and drum corps playing off screen while the crowd sings “We are Coming, Father Abra’am” and after the Amendment wins the vote those in favor sing “Battle Cry of Freedom” – the non-diegetic music in the score has elements of Civil War era music. Orchestral instruments, such as the violin, trumpet, clarinet, bassoon, horn, cello and piano, created the sounds of traditional folk music as well as hymnal modes and musical gestures in the tradition of 19th century American music. This warm, empathetic score lies just behind the elegant dialogue in scenes like Freedom’s Call and The Remembrance Theme.
Freedom’s Call could be called the main theme of Lincoln. It can be heard at several points in the film, most often when a character defies others in pursuit of Constitutional equality. This ideal is conveyed in the score in a variety of ways. First, Williams uses harmony to give the theme a sense of purity and optimism. He uses only the three major chords in a major key – I, IV, and V. He uses an interval of a third between the melody and the bass. Because these thirds are always part of a major chord the theme has a warm and positive feeling. The slow, stately manner of the theme’s chords along with the consistent short-long rhythm of the bass is reminiscent of folk music.

The theme is associated with ...

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...o hear elongated versions of the short-long rhythm heard in Freedom’s Call. This suggests that the suffering is shared by the American people and Lincoln himself – he also lost a son due to the war.
Lincoln is a marriage between music and dialogue. The music enhances emotions that dialogue alone might not. The film score provides greater understanding of the characters and the setting of the film. In Lincoln, Williams uses different settings from winds and strings to brass chorale in Freedom’s Call to bridge the public and personal side of Lincoln. In the Remembrance Theme the solo piano expresses sorrow and regret allowing us to empathize with Lincoln’s loss of a son and the tragedy of the Civil War. People attend films as a sort of catharsis. Film scores enable us to laugh, rejoice, and cry – to go through the highs and lows with the characters we are viewing.