On William Caplin's Cadence

ABSTRACT This review article on William Caplin's Cadence both solidifies the foundations laid by his decades of earlier work and highlights the novel contributions of the present volume. The first section of commentary re‐establishes Caplin's analytical philosophies, situating his cornerstone perspectives amongst those of contemporary scholars. The second and third sections spotlight a new framework established in Cadence – cadential ‘stages’, akin to those of a schema – engaging his tried‐and‐true Classical‐era definitions. The fourth and fifth sections flesh out Caplin's extensions to Baroque‐, Galant‐ and Romantic‐era repertoire, integrating approaches by contemporary scholars when appropriate. As I aim to illustrate, Caplin's framework supports a broadly unified account of common‐practice cadential behaviour – one sufficiently capacious to accommodate the many formal novelties that emerged between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.