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, in Portuguese in 2022),
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), Moi ja Soi, Muistelmat (in Finnish) 2021, Transcending Signs (ed.) 2023. He has
supervised 150 PhD:s in Finland and abroad.
