BILLY JIM LAYTON, 79, EDWARD T. CONE, 87 Last Saturday, ...

YTON, 79, EDWARD T. CONE, 87 Last Saturday, America lost two of its most vital artistic voices who, because the music industry's reward system consistently overlooks "serious music," sought refuge in academia.

Billy Jim Layton was born in 1924, in Corsicana, TX, and began his musical life as a jazz saxophonist and clarinetist prior to joining the Air Force. After doing a tour on a B-29 bomber in WWII, he took advantage of the educational subsidies made available to returning GIs and enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music. He then went to Yale for his master's and Harvard-where he studied under the well-known neo-classical composer Walter Piston-for his PhD.

In the years that followed, Layton became, if not a household name, then at least incredibly well-known-and appreciated-as a composer in a style he termed the "New Liberalism." Compositions such as "Three Dylan Thomas Poems," his "Three Studies" for piano and his much-praised string quartets earned him, besides numerous awards such as a Guggenheim fellowship, the respect of his fellow musicians and the attention of a wider public not normally associated with the serious music of the post-war years.

As Aaron Copland's output moved from Americana toward more-demanding forays into atonalism and serial techniques, composers such as Elliott Carter, George Rochberg, Roger Sessions and the younger Layton helped reinstate the possibilities still inherent in "classical music" and its more modern devices that sought to subvert, but not obliterate, the tonal system. Of this group, Layton faded the quickest-in 1966, he took over the new music department at SUNY, Stonybrook, established it as one of the leading modern-music centers in the country and taught there until his retirement in 1992. He died of complications of pneumonia, and is survived by his wife, two children and two grandchildren.

Edward Toner Cone, a native of Greensboro, NC, was a composer, pianist, musicologist and theorist attached to the music department at Princeton University from the 1940s to his death; he died of complications of open-heart surgery, according to his longtime partner, George Pitcher.

Known less for his compositions-which include works for solo piano, chamber ensembles and a symphony-than for his pioneering theoretical work in the realms of composition and serial music, Cone early on abandoned a creative career in favor of the security found in teaching. His texts, especially the brilliant Musical Form and Musical Performance of 1968, set the tone for future scholarship on the creative processes of musicians and will remain one of the very few important scholarly works on music written in America.