Fred Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire's work as a dancer and choreographer, particularly in the realm of tap dancing, made a significant contribution to the art of jazz.

"This book describes in detail how music and sound function as a constituent part of the prestige combat film's larger work of memorialization in the cultural realm of commercial cinema. As Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik note, historians must deal with 'the complexity of history, war, heroism, patriotism, memory, and the process of their representation.' Hymns for the Fallen traces an expressive sonic continuity in this 'process of representation'...