Uploaded September 2010 | Updated September 2026, 9 minutes ago
Peri Mauer, composer. Hugh Williams, flute; Theresa Hilton, clarinet; Sandra Coffin, trumpet; Desiree Elsevier, viola, Matthew Goeke, cello.
Peri Mauer, composer. Hugh Williams, flute; Theresa Hilton, clarinet; Sandra Coffin, trumpet; Desiree Elsevier, viola, Matthew Goeke, cello.
![Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-56), First Movement [1 of 2 total]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/U9InVL2Nz1E/mqdefault.jpg "Billy Jim Layton, String Quartet in Two Movements (1955-56), First Movement [1 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.")
