Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music
Theory
sclark@fas.harvard.edu
Music Building G-6
617-495-4009
Suzannah Clark specializes in the music of Franz Schubert, the history of music theory, and medieval vernacular music. Her book Analyzing Schubert was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. She co-edited Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2001; pbk 2005) with Alexander Rehding, and co-edited Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned (Boydell & Brewer, 2005) with Elizabeth Eva Leach.
Clark has given lectures in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Belgium, and Germany and has held fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (Germany), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), British Academy (UK), Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. During 2014–2015, she is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She has served on the editorial boards of Music Analysis and Music Theory Spectrum and is currently on the advisory board for Music Analysis. In 2012, she served as Chair of the Publication Awards Committee for the Society for Music Theory. She currently serves on Council for the American Musicological Society and as a member-at-large for the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory. Starting in 2013, she began a three-year stint as Reviews Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
At Harvard, Clark teaches courses primarily in music theory, but also in historical musicology. At the graduate level, she has taught Schenkerian Analysis (MUS 222r), Neo-Riemannian Theory (MUS 223r), Current Trends in Music Theory (MUS 221r), Quirks in the Major-Minor System (MUS 220r), and Theory and Analysis of Sonata Forms (MUS 230r). At the undergraduate level, she has taught courses on Tonal Analysis (MUS 151), Tonal Counterpoint (MUS 156), Theory II: The Classical Style (MUS 150a), and the Sacred and Profane in the Thirteenth-Century Motet (MUS 191r). In 2014, the Art Career Project named Clark amongst the “15 Notable Art Professors in Boston.”
She is currently working on a book, Quirks in Tonality: Aspects in the History of Tonal Space, which focuses on major issues in the history of tonal theory, such as changing conceptions of modulation, changing perceptions of key relations, constructions of diatonicism versus chromaticism, and even why theorists like to draw musical diagrams of what has come to be known as “tonal space.”
Suzannah Clark grew up mainly in Newfoundland, Canada and also went to schools in England, France, and Italy. She did her undergraduate and master’s degrees at King’s College London (UK) and graduated with an MFA (1993) and PhD (1997) from Princeton University. She spent a year at the Humboldt University as a visiting student in 1994–1995. She held a Junior Research Fellowship (1996–1999) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (1999–2000) at Merton College, Oxford. She then taught at Oxford for eight years as a University Lecturer in Music and Tutorial Fellow at Merton College before joining Harvard in 2008.