Eero Tarasti is professor of Musicology at the University of Helsinki (chair) since 1984. Director of the International Semiotics Intitute at Imatra, Finland since 1988; President of the IASS/AIS (International Association for Semiotic Studies), since 2004. Founder and president of the Semiotic Society of Finland since 1979. He studied music in Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, and then in Vienna, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Bloomington. He obtained 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 the Estonian Music Academy, the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, and Indiana University, Bloomington; he is also Honorary Fellow of Victoria College at University of Toronto; he has got decorations such as White Rose Order, Finland, Palmes Académique, France, and Ordem Rio Branco, Brazil. Tarasti has published over 400 articles and edited tens of anthologies on musicology and semiotics. He is the chair of publishing series “Acta Semiotica Fennica”. His major monographs are: Myth and Music (1979, also in French), A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994, also in French), Heitor Villa-Lobos (1996), Existential Semiotics (2000), Signs of Music (2003, also in French and Italian), Fondements de la sémiotique existentielle (2009), Fondamenti di semiotica esistenziale (2010).
