Stan Kleppinger joined the Glenn Korff School of Music in 2007. He holds a Ph.D. and a master's degree in music theory from Indiana University and a bachelor's degree in music education from Drake University. Prior to his appointment to the University of Nebraska faculty, he was an assistant professor at Butler University and a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University.

Dr. Kleppinger's research focuses on exploring and clarifying the distinctions among pitch centricity, tonality, and the perceptions of both. This interest spun out of his earlier study of Aaron Copland's music, which earned him the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music and the Dean's Dissertation Prize from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. As part of that work he received a grant from the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts to spend a week at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., studying Copland's compositional sketches housed there.

Dr. Kleppinger's work has appeared in Theory and Practice, Music Theory Online, SMT-V, twentieth-century music, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, College Music Symposium, Indiana Theory Review, American Music, and the Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy. His research has been featured at national conferences of the Society for Music Theory and international conferences in Canada, Wales, and Belgium, as well as at events sponsored by regional music theory societies and by colleges and universities across the United States.

Dr. Kleppinger is the author of Tenets of the Tonal Tradition and Beyond the Common Practice, multi-media iBooks specifically written to function as the main texts for the second-year sequence in undergraduate music theory at the GKSOM. He also teaches upper-level/graduate courses that have included musical form, prolongational analysis, analytic perspectives, analytic techniques for tonal music, analysis for performance, pitch centricity, theories of rhythm and meter, and music research techniques. Dr. Kleppinger has been recognized with teaching awards throughout his career, including the College Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2016.

Dr. Kleppinger was acting associate dean of the Hixson-Lied College during the 2018-2019 academic year. He has served as secretary of the Society for Music Theory and as president and secretary of Music Theory Midwest. He also has experience as a reader for the College Board's Advanced Placement exam in music theory.