C music professor Anne W. Robertson chronicles Don Michael Randel's contributions to musicology. To read Don Randel's scholarly work is to taste from a cornucopia of subjects and methodologies that he has addressed over more than three decades. Certain threads draw these endeavors together-for instance, his work on Hispanic and Latin American music, work that ranges from the earliest notated music on the Iberian Peninsula to the most recent living traditions in Central and South America. Influenced in the mid-1960s by his Princeton mentor Oliver Strunk, a scholar of Byzantine chant, Randel carved out a field that combined his own interest in medieval plainsong with his childhood experience living in a Latin American culture. He wrote on the music of the Mozarabic Rite, a branch of Christian liturgical chant sung in Spain until the late 11th century.
None uses a musical notation that can be deciphered.
Because we cannot be certain of exact pitches, we will never know precisely how the majority of these melodies sound. Traces of them can still be heard in a few churches in Toledo, Salamanca, and Valladolid. This herculean labor complemented his in-depth study of Mozarabic psalmody, The Responsorial Psalm Tones for the Mozarabic Offic e, based on his original dissertation and published by Princeton in 1969. Beginning in the 1970s, Randel's work moved forward in time, focusing on issues of medieval music theory and 15th-century polyphony. Musicology and Its Canon , ed.