Billy Jim Layton

Billy Jim Layton (14 November 1924, Corsicana, Texas — 30 October 2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American composer and distinguished educator who taught at Harvard University (1960–66) and served as the first chairman of SUNY Stony Brooks Music Department from 1966 until his retirement in 1992. BJ Layton held several prestigious accolades, including the University of California's Hertz Traveling Fellowship, the "Rome Prize" (1954–57) from the American Academy Of Arts And Letters, and Guggenheim Fellowship (1963). Layton was trained as a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist in his youth; he served in The United States Air Force during World War II. In 1948, Billy graduated from New England Conservatory Of Music in Boston with his Bachelor's degree after studying with Francis Judd Cooke and Carl McKinley. BJ Layton further attended Yale University, where he was tutored by Quincy Porter and earned his Master's in 1950. For postgraduate studies, Billy Jim Layton went to Harvard University, learning composition with Walter Piston and musicology with Nino Pirrotta and Otto Gombosi (1902—1955). He obtained a Ph.D. with Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass dissertation in 1960 and began teaching at Harvard. As a composer, Billy Jim Layton wrote the majority of his works between 1946 and 1964, entirely focusing on teaching in later years. In 1957, he premiered the String Quartet in Two Movements at ISCM World Music Days in Zurich, Switzerland, one of his best-known works, created during an artistic residency in Rome, Italy, sponsored by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Layton summarized his compositional approach, self-proclaimed "new liberalism," in the eponymous article published in Perspectives Of New Music, Vol 3, No 2 (Spring-Summer 1965).