Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music

Cadence explores the many ways in which the component parts of a classical composition achieve a sense of ending. The book examines cadential practice in a wide variety of musical styles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including works by well-known composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms.

Following graduate studies at the University of Chicago and the Technical University of Berlin, William Caplin joined the Faculty of Music at McGill University in 1978 and remained there until his retirement in 2022. Caplin specializes in the theory of musical form and the history of harmonic and metric theories. His ground-breaking treatise Classical Form (1998) won the Wallace Berry Book Award from the Society for Music Theory. He subsequently served that society as both Vice-President and President. In 2011, Caplin was awarded the prestigious Killam Research Fellowship and was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada in 2015.