Click here to buy Listening Out Loud (Amazon.com).
Harper & Row
In this personal and informative guide for music students and teachers, Elizabeth Swados shows how "a composer uses sound to shape, understand, and express her daily pleasures and her unanswered questions." Writing about composing from the inside out, Swados uses her own experience as a composer, teacher and musician to describe not only the training necessary for a career as a composer but also how to make music a way of life.
"She makes composing of every stripe seem both a pleasure and an honor, while making clear the inherent drawbacks of the job" – Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Book Review