Daphne Layton, daughter of Stony Brook Department of Music’s first chair, Billy Jim Layton, has endowed a fellowship in her father’s name. The Billy Jim Layton Prize will be awarded annually to a student “showing excellent promise in composition” and is a monetary award to help students free up time to compose music.
Billy Jim Layton, one of only seven chairs of the Department of Music over the last 52 years, was a celebrated composer whose “String Quartet” attracted the following notice from The New York Times’s Eric Salzman: “Billy Jim Layton’s String Quartet is as vital, as startling, and as overwhelming as if nobody had ever written a quartet before.”
Perry Goldstein, chair of the Music Department, writes, “When I came to Stony Brook in 1992, Billy Jim Layton had only recently retired and his contributions to the department were still very much in the air. We are pleased to have him remembered through an endowment that will support young composers for many years to come.”