Don Michael Randel is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Chicago, a prominent American musicologist, and the fifth, now retired, president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He has previously served as the twelfth president of the University of Chicago and during that time as faculty member in the Department of Music. While on the faculty at Cornell University, he chaired the Department of Music there, and served as Provost and as Dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences.
In his academic work, Randel specializes in the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Among musicologists, he is particularly known for his publications on Mozarabic chant, Arabic music theory, and Latin American popular music. He has published on Rubén Blades and is currently working on Schumann and Cole Porter. He has served as editor of the third and fourth editions of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, and the Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. His essays and articles appear in Ḗtudes Gregoriennes, ;The Musical Quarterly, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music and Language, De Musicología, MLA Notes, Disciplining Music, edited by Phlip V. Bohlman and Katherine Bergeron,& and& Words and Music. He is the author of An Index to the Chant of the Mozarabic Rite and The Responsorial Psalm Tones for the Mozarabic Office. He is a triple alumnus of Princeton University, having earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in musicology there.