(b 26 Feb 1717; d Cambridge, 18 March 1799). English organist and composer, brother of william Randall (ii). As a chorister under Bernard Gates in the Chapel Royal, he sang the title role in Handel’s Esther given on 23 February 1732 directed by the composer at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. He graduated MusB at Cambridge in 1744 and later held a variety of posts as organist of King’s College (1745, or 1743 according to Mann), St John’s, Pembroke and Trinity (1777). In 1755 he succeeded Maurice Greene as professor of music, and the following year proceeded MusD. On 5 October 1756 he married Grace Pattison. The music that he composed for Gray’s ode for the installation of the Duke of Grafton as chancellor of the university (July 1769) is now lost. Burney, who originally intended to set the ode, wrote a spiteful and inaccurate biography of Randall in Rees’s Cyclopaedia. Randall edited a collection of psalms and hymn tunes (Cambridge, 1794), including several of his own; a number of song settings and hymn tunes (two reprinted in the English Hymnal as nos.93 and 250) survive, as well as the anthems O be joyful (GB-Cjc), O Lord, grant the king (Cjc, Ckc) and Who hath believed our report? (D-Hs, GB-Cjc, Ckc).
J.D. Brown and S.S. Stratton: British Musical Biography (Birmingham, 1897/R)
A.H. Mann: Cambridge notebooks (MS, GB-Ckc)
P.A. Scholes: The Great Dr Burney (Oxford, 1948/R)
P.M. Young: ‘The Dramatic Element Introduced into Handel Performances at Cambridge in the Early Twentieth Century’, HJb 1991, 171–6
CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD