The winner of the inaugural Billy Jim Layton Prize is Jacinth Greywoode, which he will use to augment the budget to workshop a musical about Sally Hemings entitled “Black Girl in Paris” and to premiere on June 6.
Praised by BroadwayWorld as a “dramatically sophisticated” writer, composer and music director Jacinth Greywoode is a New York-based Florida native whose family hails from Sierra Leone. His compositions, which range from classical chamber pieces to Broadway-style theater music, have been performed throughout the Americas and in Europe and Africa by such groups as The Civilians, American Opera Projects, and the Calidore String Quartet.
From 2012 to 2013, Jacinth was a Teaching Artist with the Sequoia Foundation of Rio de Janeiro and in 2015 he composed for the International Music Festival of the Adriatic in Trieste, Italy, from which he received the Duino Prize in composition. Recent credits include the Encores! Off-Center Lobby Project at New York City Center; MASTER, a short-form opera in collaboration with America Opera Projects; and WHITE RAVEN/BLACK DOVE, an opera commission from Cerise Jacobs/White Snake Projects premiering in Boston in November 2022.
As music director, Jacinth has worked on various readings, workshops, and shows with the Public Theater, Universal Theatrical Group, Roundabout Theatre Company, and NYU Tisch among others. Most recently he was Music Consultant and Arranger for Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A SOLDIER’S PLAY, which was nominated for the 2020 Best Revival of a Play Tony Award. Other recent roles include Associate Music Director for Tennessee William’s THE ROSE TATTOO at American Airlines Theater (2020 Tony Nomination for Best Original Score), Music Assistant for Jason Michael Webb and Lelund Durond Thompson’s WiLDFLOWER at the Apollo Theater, and Music Supervisor for THIS IS B.S.
A resident of Washington Heights, Jacinth received a Bachelor of Arts in music with a Certificate in collaborative piano performance from Princeton University, a Master of Arts in composition from Stony Brook University, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
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 eight chairs of the Department of Music over the last 53 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, the former chair of the Music Department who oversaw the creation of the prize, 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. The Department of Music is deeply grateful to Billy Jim’s daughter, Daphne Layton, for initiating this prize and keeping alive Billy Jim’s spirit within the department.”