J.K. Randall

J. K. Randall has described himself as a “pitchfreak." He was born in Cleveland in June 16, 1929, and lived in Princeton, NJ until his death on May 28, 2014. He lived with his wife of 57 years, two dogs, a turtle, and a cat. He studied piano with Leonard Shure and composition with Herbert Elwell, Alexei Haieff, George Thaddeus Jones, and Milton Babbitt, and taught at Princeton University from 1957 until his retirement in 1991. In the early ‘60s, he and Godfrey Winham inaugurated a computer music facility at Princeton, using a modified version of Bell Laboratories’ Music IV program. He has composed for piano, voice, violin and computer, marimba and violin (“Svejk”), saxophone and percussion, C-Sound, and most recently for Midi. Writing words, and especially words about, or reflective of, music, has been focal for Mr. Randall, as exemplified in Compose Yourself and Being About Music (2 vols., with Benjamin Boretz).