Biography
Composer Billy Jim Layton embodied the movement he himself labeled "new liberalism," a style he characterized as "a new, rich, meaningful, varied, understandable and vital music which maintains contact with the great cultural tradition of humanism in the West." His birthplace was Corsicana, TX, on November 14, 1924. During adolescence he took up saxophone and clarinet, yet set aside an emerging path in jazz performance to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, where he flew a B-29 bomber throughout World War II. Upon completing his service he enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music, later obtaining a master's degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Between 1946 and 1964 he created his body of work, which featured a sequence of well-received, lucid piano pieces such as "Three Dylan Thomas Poems" and "Three Studies," along with multiple string quartets. In those years Layton was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; his seminal essay "The New Liberalism" was published in the spring/summer 1965 issue of Perspectives of New Music. In 1966 he suddenly ceased composing upon becoming the inaugural chairman of the music department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; over the ensuing decades he developed that program into one of the leading and most respected centers for new music within American higher education. Complications from pneumonia led to his death in Cambridge, MA, on October 30, 2004.