James Kirtland Randall

James Kirtland Randall was born in 1929 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was trained as a pianist by Leonard Shure, a leading interpreter of Beethoven and student of Artur Schnabel. At Columbia, Harvard, and later Princeton, he shifted his focus from performance to composition and theory, studying with some of the most prominent American modernists of the postwar period. In 1958, after completing his graduate work at Princeton, he joined the university’s music faculty, where he would remain until his retirement in 1991. Known for his sharp wit and unconventional teaching style, he challenged students to rethink the boundaries of analysis and composition, sparking lively debate within the university’s musical community.

Randall was one of the first composers to treat the computer as a musical instrument. At Princeton in the 1960s, he worked with colleagues in the Computer Center to adapt Max Mathews’ MUSIC software for the university’s IBM 7090 and later 7094 mainframes, producing work in MUSIC IV-B, a version written in Macro Assembler. Writing long sequences of instructions on punch cards, he designed his own software, controlling pitch, rhythm, timbre, and the internal structure of a single note in ways no performer could replicate. Pieces including Quartets in Pairs in 1964, Mudgett: Monologues by a Mass Murderer in 1965, and Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer in 1966–68 demonstrated the precision and the expressive challenges of this new medium. Mudgett later appeared on one of the first commercial LPs of computer music, while Lyric Variations became a touchstone for integrating live performance with synthesized sound. Randall approached the computer as a laboratory, using it to test compositional ideas and to rethink the foundations of musical form. He was particularly interested in how expression might emerge from a machine, experimenting with coded irregularities in timing and intensity to echo the nuance of live performance. His efforts made Princeton’s Music Department the largest academic user of computing time on campus and established a close link with the research at Bell Labs, helping to position the university as a leading center for computer music. By the late 1970s, Randall shifted his attention to live performance, beginning a long-running series of group improvisations under the name Inter/Play, and later returned to acoustic composition through his GAP series for piano and a number of works for small ensembles.

In the 1960s Randall began publishing in Perspectives of New Music, a journal founded by his Princeton colleagues that became a key platform for contemporary composition and theory in the United States. His essays combined analysis, speculation, and an idiosyncratic use of language. His Compose Yourself: A Manual for the Young became known for its unconventional style, while his collected writings with Benjamin Boretz, Being About Music, traced more than four decades of theoretical reflection. His computer works reached wider audiences through early commercial recordings, including the Nonesuch Computer Music LP in 1970, and later through a series of Open Space releases that documented both electronic and acoustic pieces as well as the improvisational sessions of Inter/Play. His manuscripts, computer code, and recordings are preserved in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Randall passed away in 2014.