About

Suzannah Clark is the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Her academic specialization includes the music of Franz Schubert, the history of music theory, and medieval vernacular music. She authored the book 'Analyzing Schubert,' published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, and has co-edited works such as 'Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century' and 'Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture.' Clark has delivered lectures across the UK, USA, Canada, France, Belgium, and Germany, and has held fellowships from notable institutions including the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the National Humanities Center. During 2014–2015, she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Her service includes editorial roles on prominent music theory journals and leadership positions within the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society. At Harvard, she teaches courses in music theory and historical musicology at both graduate and undergraduate levels, focusing on topics such as Schenkerian Analysis, Neo-Riemannian Theory, and the history of tonal space. Clark grew up mainly in Newfoundland, Canada, and studied at King’s College London and Princeton University, with additional studies at Humboldt University and Oxford, where she held research fellowships and taught for several years before joining Harvard in 2008.

Research topics

• Literature
• Political Science
• Art
• History
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Art history
• Materials science
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Traces of Tourism and Transnationalism in Liszt’s Heine Settings

  British Academy eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  • History

  Shortly after touring the Rhinelands in the early 1840s, Liszt began setting two poems by Heine that feature the Rhine: ‘Im Rhein’ (S. 272) and ‘Die Lorelei’ (S. 273). They were published together in 1843 in a collection of mostly German songs and one Italian song, which Liszt titled <italic>Buch der Lieder</italic> after Heine’s own collection of poems published in 1827 and from which ‘Im Rhein’ and ‘Die Lorelei’ are drawn. Based on a public letter written while Liszt was on holiday in Nonnenwerth and published in Paris during his lifetime, this essay argues that two life experiences that happened within days of each other in the summer of 1841 indelibly link these two songs in Liszt’s biography and offer insights in how to read his musical settings. Firstly, Liszt travelled passed the Lorelei rock by steamship, which was so noisy and created so much smoke that he complained he could not properly take in either the landscape or the soundscape of the famed location along the river, which, according to a newly minted legend, inhabited by a siren-figure called Lorelei. Secondly, he was invited by the citizens of Cologne to provide a benefit concert to help raise funds to finish the construction of the Cologne cathedral, which had lain incomplete since the fifteenth century. Although he had already composed ‘Im Rhein’, shortly after his success in Cologne, he composed ‘Die Lorelei’. In 1856, Liszt published substantially revised versions of both songs. By then, he had settled in Weimar and was no longer the cosmopolitan visitor with a multitude of national allegiances, which opens the different versions to an analysis through Liszt’s own lived experience – that is, through the lens of tourism versus transnationalism. The essay compares the two versions as contrasting reactions to the loco-descriptive elements in Heine’s poems. Through a close analysis of Liszt’s choices of form, harmony, melodic contour, and accompanimental figuration, I argue that, in the case of ‘Im Rhein’, Liszt’s revision reveal a greater intimacy with the monuments described in Heine’s poem and, in the case of ‘Die Lorelei’, the setting becomes more idyllic over time, suggesting an erasure of Liszt’s own traumatic journey and the technological developments in shipping that had drowned out and obscured the sonic and visual aura of the famous and perilous bend in the river. In both cases, the transnational perspective brings to the fore ways in which the sense of flow, movement of light, navigation, boundaries, and the crossing of thresholds are either facilitated or hampered in Heine’s poems and Liszt’s music.

  PublisherDOI

• 8. Polytextuality

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Materials science
  PublisherDOI

• Polytextuality

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • History

  A short definition of polytextuality is followed by an account of debates about meaning that polytextuality in music has engendered in recent scholarship. Examples are then given, centred on thirteenth-century motets and on fourteenth-century songs. The chapter includes a table of the different types of fourteenth-century polytextuality found in the song repertoire.

  PublisherDOI

• Key and Modulation

  2019-03-14

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  What harmonic features are involved when a musical passage, or a work, is in a particular key? How is balance achieved between modulations that reinforce the home key and those that supplant it altogether? The chapter starts by analyzing “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” the opening song in Robert Schumann’s song-cycle <italic>Dichterliebe</italic>. It considers the criteria for identifying keys and provides a brief history of the role of closure in the definition of key before discussing how composers move between keys and what kinds of key relations they choose. It then explores new theoretical insights on common-tone modulation, along with the issue of content versus cadence in determining degrees of certainty about the establishment of new internal keys. It also compares definitions of tonicization and modulation and concludes with an assessment of how key relations have been shaped into tonal spaces. An important observation—one that highlights the tension between contents and cadences—is that the presence or absence of a final cadence is commonly used to ascertain whether or not a key has been fully articulated. The chapter describes a range of scenarios of such tension as well as the views of various theorists and analysts regarding the relative importance of content versus cadence.

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• When Words Converge and Meanings Diverge:

  Boydell & Brewer eBooks · 2018-05-18 · 16 citations

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• When Words Converge and Meanings Diverge: Counterexamples to Polytextuality in the Thirteenth-Century Mote

  2018-05-18

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  PublisherDOI

• 10. When Words Converge and Meanings Diverge: Counterexamples to Polytextuality in the Thirteenth-Century Motet

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2018-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• A Gift to Goethe: The Aesthetics of the Intermediate Dominant in Schubert’s Music and Early Nineteenth-Century Theoretical Thought

  Nineteenth-Century Music Review · 2016-04-04 · 1 citations

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  Schubert is famous for his remote modulations, especially his third relations. He therefore has a reputation for harbouring an aversion to the dominant, both in terms of its function as a harmonic preparation for new keys and as a structural pole to the tonic home key. I turn to the history of theory to reveal a more nuanced history of Schubert’s attitude towards the dominant. In a revision of ‘Geistes-Gruß’ (D. 142), a song he sent to Goethe in 1816, Schubert added a brief dominant-seventh chord to soften an abrupt modulation to a remote key. Such an insertion between remote keys was coined an ‘intermediate dominant’ by Schubert’s contemporary Anton Reicha and was understood to be a sufficient preparation for a new remote key. In four subsequent versions of ‘Geistes-Gruß’, Schubert strengthened, rather than weakened, this intermediate dominant – only to remove it altogether in the final published version. I scrutinize Schubert’s use of intermediate dominants that, together with other techniques such as the use of silence, act as a harmonic cushion between abrupt third relations in a range of early multi-sectional songs and in the medial caesura-fill in the Unfinished and Great Symphonies. I compare Schubert’s compositional strategies with the theories of modulation and harmonic juxtaposition by his contemporary music theorists Anton Reicha and Gottfried Weber, and I argue that they share a strikingly similar aesthetic of the power of the intermediate dominant.

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• Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism by Lisa Feuerzeig

  Fontes artis musicae · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism by Lisa Feuerzeig Suzannah Clark Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism. By Lisa Feuerzeig. Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. [xvi, 198 pp. ISBN 978-1-4094-4788-7. $149.95 (cloth)] Schubert’s contemporaries cultivated the idea that Schubert was an intuitive composer with little intellectual acumen for handling large-scale instrumental forms and even less discrimination or care for the poetic quality of the texts he set to song—a legacy that has persisted to the present day, especially amongst Schubert lovers. Feurzeig’s study belongs to a growing body of critiques of this received view of Schubert, including studies by such scholars as Christopher Gibbs, Scott Messing, Susan Youens, and myself. Feurzeig thus presents a very different image of Schubert, arguing that he exhibited sustained engagement with the highly intellectual philosophical movement of the Frühromantik. Capable therefore of abstract thinking, Schubert returned frequently to the poems of two of the movement’s central proponents: Friedrich [End Page 319] Schlegel and Novalis, the latter being the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg. Feurzeig’s book deals with all of the Novalis settings taken from the poet’s Geistliche Lieder and Hymnen an die Nacht, all of the settings from Schlegel’s Abendröte, and two of five other Schlegel settings, “Im Walde” and “Blanka” (p. xiii). Far from setting poems haphazardly, Feurzeig demonstrates that Schubert made judicious choices in selecting eleven of the twenty-two poems that made up Schlegel’s poetic cycle Abendröte. While apparently eschewing some poems such as “Die Lüfte” (“The Breezes”), “Zwei Nachtigallen” (“Two Nightingales”), “Der Wasserfall” (“The Waterfall”), and “Der Sänger” (“The Singer”) that would have lent themselves to latent musical effects, Schubert’s choices reveal a willingness to tackle the art of setting poems about inanimate objects and silent phenomena. The book comprises six chapters. The first and third introduce readers to the important philosophical debates that consumed the young thinkers who ushered in German Romanticism in the 1790s. The first chapter, “The Berlin/Jena Romantics”, provides an overview of the ideas and chief figures involved in the Frühromantik, who were largely located in Berlin and Jena. The third chapter, “Early Romantic Hermeneutics”, explicates the early Romantic revival of Greek art and literature and interest in the Bible, focusing in particular on the profound influence of Schleiermacher, a theologian and translator into German of Plato’s dialogues. As Feurzeig herself readily admits, these chapters do not contain new discoveries or ideas but are historical and philosophical overviews (p. 1). They are, however, immensely valuable chapters. Novices to early Romantic philosophy and nineteenth-century hermeneutics will do well under Feurzeig’s tutelage: her summaries are highly readable and the concepts are lucidly explained. The seasoned philosopher and/or practitioner of hermeneutics will marvel at her ability to distil the essence of the complex and at times abtruse ideas of the early Romantics and to explicate how the foundational ideas of modern hermeneutics in the nineteenth century continue to shape our interpretative impulses. In between these two chapters, Feurzeig sets out her case for Schubert as abstract thinker using the song “Die Berge” (D. 634), which is drawn from Schlegel’s Abendröte (Chapter 2: “Case Study: ‘Die Berge’ and Schubert as Abstract Thinker”). Abendröte is a cycle in which each poem is told from the perspective of a different persona, always named in the title. While she could have chosen any of the songs by Schlegel to build her case, “Die Berge” (“The Mountains”) is a particularly pertinent example for overturning common wisdom about Schubert. As John Reed opined in The Schubert Song Companion (Mandolin: Manchester University Press, 1985; reprint 1997, 159) “Schubert is content to look at the external imagery rather than the contemplative centre. . . . The commentators are silent about Die Berge, and indeed it is a strangely unconvincing song.” The emphasis on the external imagery is precisely the philosophical point: Schlegel’s poem is a manifestation of the Kantian schema, which requires “a text that is governed by an abstract idea and that implies that idea without...

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• Review of Susan Wollenberg,<i>Schubert’s Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works</i>(Ashgate, 2011)

  Music Theory Online · 2013-10-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nicholas Mathew

  5 shared

• Yael Braunschweig

  2 shared

• Elizabeth Eva Leach

  2 shared

• James Hepokoski

  1 shared

• John Deathridge

  1 shared

• Roger Parker

  1 shared

• Helen Hibberd

  1 shared

• Richard Will

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2014–20…
• Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (201…
• Art Career Project named Clark amongst the “15 Notable Art P…