The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis
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One of the first musicians to use Roman numerals to label chords was Gottfried Weber (1779-1839), who lists the types of triads built above the scale and labels each with an upper- or lowercase Roman numeral in his textbook Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (published in 1817-21). Weber's system of Roman numerals was immediately adopted by other textbook writers, and has become a standard way of labeling chords.