Suzannah Clark

Suzannah Clark

Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music
Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center
Suzannah Clark
Suzannah Clark is the Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She is a specialist in the history of music theory, vernacular music of the 12th and 13th centuries, and the music of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt. Her primary interest is on how music-theoretical paradigms have been defined by ideas of nature and scientific discovery from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, and she focuses in particular on theoretical frameworks that have been mapped geometrically into what are known as “pitch spaces” and “tonal spaces.” Her interest in songs—of both the middle ages and the nineteenth century—has often focused on the differentiation between indoor and outdoor, rural and urban, and realist and imaginary spaces in musical soundscapes, as well as on fanciful assertions of how sound travels within songworlds. Such songs often feature urban dwellers who seek interiors or seek to escape beyond the boundaries of the city or other forms of confinement. Clark addresses how the crossings of such thresholds are captured sonically.