Brief info
Associate
Don Michael Randel has devoted his venerable career to the performing arts, higher education, and philanthropy. Don is President Emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and President Emeritus of the University of Chicago. He is the editor of The Harvard Dictionary of Music, The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
After serving on the faculty of Syracuse University, Don joined the music faculty of Cornell University, where he remained for more than three decades, ascending from Department Chair to Vice Provost, to Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and, ultimately, to Provost.
He is a member of the board of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Hall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and CNA Financial. He has also served on the boards of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Argonne National Laboratory, and Rockefeller University.
Don earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in music from Princeton University. His scholarly interests include medieval liturgical chant—especially in Spain, medieval Arabic music theory, secular polyphony in France and Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Latin American popular music, and the songs of Robert Schumann and Cole Porter.