Eero Tarasti

Eero Tarasti (b. 1948), professor of musicology at the University of Helsinki (chair) in 1984-2016. He was President of the IASS/AIS (International Association for Semiotic Studies), 2004-2014 and is now its Honorary President. In 2016 he has founded the Academy of Cultural Heritages.

He studied music in Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, and then in Vienna, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Bloomington. He got his PhD from Helsinki University (1978) after studies in Paris with Claude Lévi-Strauss and A. J. Greimas. He is one of the founders and the director of the international research group Musical Signification since 1984.Tarasti has become Honorary Doctor at Estonian Music Academy, New Bulgarian University (Sofia), Indiana University (Bloomington) , University of Aix-Marseille and Georghe Dima Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Rumania.

He has published about 400 articles, edited 50 anthologies, and written 30 monographs; among them one finds: Myth and Music (1979), A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994), Heitor Villa-Lobos (1996), Existential Semiotics (2000), Signs of Music (2003), Fondéments de la sémiotique existentielle (2009), Fondamenti di semiotica esistenziale (2010), Semiotics of Classical Music (2012, in French 2016),and Sein und Schein, Explorations in Existential Semiotics (2015); two novels: Le secret du professeur Amfortas ( 2002) and Retour à la Villa Nevski (2014, in Italian L’heredità di Villa Nevski, 2014 in Finnish Eurooppa/Ehkä 2017). He has supervised 150 PhD:s in Finland and abroad.