William Caplin completed undergraduate studies in music composition at the University of Southern California and graduate studies in the history and theory of music at the University of Chicago, working with Leonard B. Meyer, Edward E. Lowinsky, and Philip Gossett. He has pursued additional studies in musicology at Berlin Technical University under Carl Dahlhaus. Caplin has been teaching at McGill University since 1978 and was appointed James McGill Professor of Music Theory in January 2005. In 2011, he was awarded a two-year Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts for his project 'Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music.' In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Academy of Arts and Humanities. Caplin specializes in the theory of musical form, conducting extensive investigations into the formal procedures of late-eighteenth-century music. His seminal 1998 book 'Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions in Instrumental Music' has received critical acclaim, including the 1999 Wallace Berry Book Award from the Society for Music Theory. Caplin has published research on musical form in several prestigious journals and has been active in presenting his findings at international conferences and workshops. He regularly teaches courses in tonal theory analysis, nineteenth-century analysis, tonal composition, and the history of theory.