Polemics by a leading American composer. There is a 1961 preface with Thomson's thoughts about what he said in the original 1939 edition. Chapters: Our Island Home (what it feels like to be a musician); The Neighbors (chiefly about painters and painting); Survivals of an Earlier Civilization (poets dead and gone); Life among the Natives (musical habits and customs); Life in the Big City (the civil status of musicians); How Composers Eat (who does what to whom and who gets paid); What Composers Write How (the economic determinism of musical style); Composers' Politics (professional bodies versus the secular state); Intellectual Freedom (what can and cannot be censored); How to write a piece (functional design in music); Back to the Womb, James (how modern music gets that way); Back to Politics (how to run an island civilization).