William Caplin

William E. Caplin (born 1948) is an American music theorist who lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is a James McGill Professor at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. Caplin served as president of the Society for Music Theory from 2005 to 2007 and was its vice-president from 2001 to 2003.[1] His earlier work concentrated on the history of music theory,[2] but he is best known for a series of articles and two books on musical form in European music around 1800. The first of those books, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven[3] has been widely influential and was a major factor in the revival of interest in musical form in North-American music theory.[4]

  1. ^ Society for Music Theory. "SMT Officers". Retrieved 12 February 2018.
  2. ^ William E. Caplin. (1981). Theories of Harmonic-Metric Relationships from Rameau to Riemann. PhD diss. University of Chicago.
  3. ^ Caplin, William E. (1998). Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Oxford University Press.
  4. ^ Editors' introduction to Formal Functions in Perspective: Essays on Musical Form from Haydn to Adorno, edited by Steven Vande Moortele and Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers (University of Rochester Press, 2015), p. 1.