Music Studies Colloquium: Suzannah Clark (Harvard University)

When Mozart came across a treatise written in 1776 by Abbé Vogler that used Roman numerals to describe harmonies within a key, he despaired. Mozart wrote a letter to his father complaining that Vogler’s theory was “more use for learning to count than to compose.” In the early nineteenth century, Vogler’s pupil Gottfried Weber fine-tuned the analytical system—and complaints raged yet again, notably by A. B. Marx, who rejected the Roman numeral sys...