Uploaded February 2010 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
William Masselos (11 August 1920 - 23 October 1992) was a famous American pianist who studied with Carl Friedberg, a disciple of Brahms and Clara Schumann, and also with Nelly Reuschel (another Clara Schumann disciple) at New York's Institute of Musical Art (later called Juilliard School).
William Masselos was born on August 11, 1920 in Niagara Falls to a Dutch mother and a Greek father. He made his New York The Town Hall debut at the age of 18, in 1938. In 1952, at the age of 32, Masselos played the Brahms Piano Concerto in D minor in his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Dimitri Mitropoulos. This impressive debut was the first in a long line of appearances with major orchestras which also included the New York Philharmonic under Monteux and Bernstein, the Montreal Symphony under Klemperer, the London Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink, the American Symphony Orchestra under Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy, and numerous others.
Known as a champion of contemporary music, Masselos premiered many works including the Charles Ives Piano Sonata No. 1, the Piano Fantasy by Aaron Copland, and most of the piano literature by Ben Weber, including the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and the Fantasy (Variations), Op.25. He was the soloist in the first performances of piano concertos by Alan Hovhaness, Johan Franco, Marga Richter, Carlos Surinach, and William Mayer, in addition to solo pieces by John Cage, Dane Rudhyar, Robert Helps, Carlos Chavez, and many others.
As an heir, through Carl Friedberg, of the Schumann and Brahms tradition, he was also particularly noted for his interpretation of the Schumann Davidsbundlertanze Op. 6 and the Brahms Sonatas, both of which he recorded for RCA in the early 1970s and are highly esteemed record collector items.
William Masselos (11 August 1920 - 23 October 1992) was a famous American pianist who studied with Carl Friedberg, a disciple of Brahms and Clara Schumann, and also with Nelly Reuschel (another Clara Schumann disciple) at New York's Institute of Musical Art (later called Juilliard School).
William Masselos was born on August 11, 1920 in Niagara Falls to a Dutch mother and a Greek father. He made his New York The Town Hall debut at the age of 18, in 1938. In 1952, at the age of 32, Masselos played the Brahms Piano Concerto in D minor in his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Dimitri Mitropoulos. This impressive debut was the first in a long line of appearances with major orchestras which also included the New York Philharmonic under Monteux and Bernstein, the Montreal Symphony under Klemperer, the London Philharmonic under Bernard Haitink, the American Symphony Orchestra under Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy, and numerous others.
Known as a champion of contemporary music, Masselos premiered many works including the Charles Ives Piano Sonata No. 1, the Piano Fantasy by Aaron Copland, and most of the piano literature by Ben Weber, including the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and the Fantasy (Variations), Op.25. He was the soloist in the first performances of piano concertos by Alan Hovhaness, Johan Franco, Marga Richter, Carlos Surinach, and William Mayer, in addition to solo pieces by John Cage, Dane Rudhyar, Robert Helps, Carlos Chavez, and many others.
As an heir, through Carl Friedberg, of the Schumann and Brahms tradition, he was also particularly noted for his interpretation of the Schumann Davidsbundlertanze Op. 6 and the Brahms Sonatas, both of which he recorded for RCA in the early 1970s and are highly esteemed record collector items.
![Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos [1963]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qG9ItqMVdk/mqdefault.jpg "Hans Werner Henze, Being Beauteous for coloratura soprano, harp and four cellos [1963]
Devant une neige un Etre de Beauté de haute taille. Des sifflements de mort et des cercles de musique sourde fontmonter, sélargir et trembler comme un spectre ce corps adoré, des blessures écarlates et noires éclatent dans les chairs superbes. Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la Vision, sur le chantier. Et les frissons sélèvent et grondent et la saveur forcenée de ces effets se chargeant avec les sifflements mortels et les rauques musiques que le monde, loin derrière nous, lance sur notre mère de beauté, - elle recule, elle se dresse. Oh! nos os sont revêtus dun nouveau corps amoureux.
O la face cendrée, lécusson de crin, les bras de cristal ! Le canon sur lequel je dois mabattre à travers la mêlée des arbres et de lair léger !
Arthur Rimbaud
Hans Werner Henze (born 1 July 1926, Gütersloh, Westphalia) is a German composer of prodigious output best known for his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life.[1] His music is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition.
Henze is also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. He lives in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and still travels extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work. An avowed Marxist and member of the Communist Party of Italy. In 1945, he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre, and was able to continue his studies under Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg in 1946.
Henze had some successful performances at Darmstadt, including an immediate success in 1946 with a neo-baroque work for piano, flute and strings, that brought him to the attention of Schotts, the music publishers. He also took part in the famous Darmstadt New Music Summer School, a key vehicle for the propagation of avant-garde techniques. At the 1947 summer school, Henze turned his thoughts more thoroughly to serial technique, and it seemed for a while as if he might become a leader of young German composers in this idiom.")
![Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-1956), First Movement [2 of 2 total]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8nL5pkmdbc8/mqdefault.jpg "Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-1956), First Movement [2 of 2 total]
Billy Jim Layton, an innovative American composer of the 1950s and 60s who was well known in his prime but abruptly stopped composing and concentrated on academic pursuits, died on Saturday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 79.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his daughter, Daphne Layton.
Mr. Layton, who became the first chairman of the music department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was widely recognized in his time as a fresh musical voice. He wrote well-crafted pieces in a style he termed new liberalism, which he described, according to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as a new, rich, meaningful, varied, understandable and vital music which maintains contact with the great cultural tradition of humanism in the West.
Reviewing a performance of Mr. Laytons work in The New York Times in 1960, Eric Salzman wrote, Billy Jim Laytons String Quartet is as vital, as startling, and as overwhelming as if nobody had ever written a quartet before.
Born in Corsicana, Tex., on Nov. 14, 1924, Mr. Layton started out in music as a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist before joining the Air Force and serving in a B-29 bomber in World War II. After the war, he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, going on to Yale for his masters degree and Harvard for his Ph.D.; his teachers included the composer Walter Piston.
It was at the New England Conservatory that he met his wife, Evro Zeniou, a native of Cyprus, whom he married in 1949.
From 1946 to 1964, Mr. Layton wrote a number of well-received pieces, including Three Dylan Thomas Poems and Three Studies for piano; and won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1966, Mr. Layton was appointed chairman of the new music department at Stony Brook, which he helped to establish as a dynamic presence on the music scene, bringing in important composers and performers, in a tradition that remains alive today. In 2002, Brian Wise acknowledged the Stony Brook music department as small but vital in The New York Times.
In 1992, Mr. Layton retired and moved with his wife to Cambridge to be near his two children, Alexis and Daphne, and two grandchildren, all of whom survive him.
This recording of the String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-56) is by the Claremont String Quartet.
We apologize humbly, profusely, and on our bended knees for the execrable sound quality of this 1950s thirty-three-and-one-third revolutions-per-minute long-playing microgroove recording.")
