Leslie David Blasius is professor of music theory. He received his B.M. in percussion performance from Eastern Kentucky University. He then attended Princeton University, studying composition and theory with Milton Babbitt and Peter Westergaard, and historical musicology with Kenneth Levy and Margaret Bent. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1994, and prior to coming to UW-Madison taught at Princeton University, Rider College, and Seton Hall University.

Blasius has had compositions performed by the Princeton University Orchestra, the Atlantic String Quartet, and the Fiati Chamber Players. He has delivered papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society on such topics as continuity in the music of Josquin and 18th-century theories of the origin of music, and at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory on the topics of rhythmic theory and the epistemology of Schenker's Kontrapunkt, and this past year read at Merton College, Oxford, and the University of Chicago.

His first book, Schenker's Argument and the Claims of Music Theory (1996), was the recipient of the 1997 Young Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. His second book, The Music Theory of Godfrey Winham (Princeton University, 1997), was a study of the formal logic and musical epistemology of one of the principal figures in the renaissance of music theory in the 1960s. He has also written on the early 19th-century piano method, and is currently working on a study of music and the notions of "truth" and "authenticity."