Swafford has written columns on music and other subjects in
Slate, and is heard as a commentator on
NPR and the
BBC. He is a regular program annotator for orchestras and venues including the
Boston Symphony,
Cleveland Orchestra,
Chicago Symphony,
San Francisco Symphony, the Metropolitan Opera, and
Carnegie Hall. He provided liner notes for two
DGG collections of the complete Beethoven symphonies. His writing honors include a 2012 Deems Taylor Award for internet writing, a Mellon Fellowship at Harvard, and an honorary Harvard Phi Beta Kappa. His Brahms and Ives biographies were end-of-year Critics' Choices in
The New York Times. The Ives biography was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in biography and won the Pen-Winship prize for a book on a New England subject. His biography
Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph in its first week appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. He has taught at schools including
Boston University,
Amherst College,
Tufts, and
Boston Conservatory. Swafford's music, which is highly lyrical and moves freely between
tonality and
atonality, has been called
New Romantic in style. There are equal if less overt contributions from
world music, especially
Indian and
Balinese, and from
jazz and
blues. The titles of his works reveal a steady inspiration from nature and landscape. The composer views his own work as a kind of
classicism: a concern with clarity, directness, and expression, or as he puts it, "music that sounds familiar though it is new, works that sound like they wrote themselves." Notable are his
orchestral works
Landscape with Traveler (1979–80),
After Spring Rain (1981–82)
From the Shadow of the Mountain, (2001), and "Late August," the
piano quintet Midsummer Variations (1985), the
piano quartet They Who Hunger (1989), and the
piano trio They That Mourn (2002), the last in memoriam
9/11. In 2012
cellist Rhonda Rider premiered his solo cello work
The Silence at Yuma Point, part of a commissioning project of pieces inspired by the
Grand Canyon (where Swafford has been a frequent hiker). In 2024 Orchestra New England premiered his "Late Autumn - First Snow." His recordings include "They Who Hunger" by the Scott Chamber players and the solo piano work "Music Like Steel and Like Fire" by pianist Adam Golka. His compositional awards include a
National Endowment for the Arts Composer Grant, two Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowships, and a Tanglewood Fellowship. His work is published by
Peermusic Classical and
Meridian Records. ==Awards and honors==