Erkki Pekkilä

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Erkki Pekkilä is a Finnish musicologist, serving as professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Helsinki since 2001. Pekkilä received his Ph.D. in 1988. His doctoral thesis dealt with Finnish folk music, cognitive maps and generative grammars. Pekkilä then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Indiana University at the Research Center for Semiotics and Language, where he studied semiotics with Thomas Sebeok. After his return to Finland, he was the visiting professor of musicology at the University of Jyväskylä in 1993-1996.

Pekkilä is one of the founding members of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology and the Semiotic society of Finland. He is also the co-founder and previous editor of the Finnish Yearbook for Ethnomusicology and the former editor of the Finnish musicological journal "Musicology". Pekkilä has carried out field work in Bulgaria and worked shorter periods as a visiting scholar in a number of countries, including France, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.He has visited and given guest lectures in a number of countries, including the United States, Japan, China, Ireland, and Mexico.

Pekkilä is author of Music as Text: A Theory and Method for the Analysis of Aurally Transmitted Musical Cultures (Helsinki, 1988), Silent Ecstasy (Helsinki 1990), Steel Pan, Mbalax and Gamelan: Studies in the Music of Immigrants (Helsinki, 2002), and over 100 articles and reviews on topics ranging from folk music to cell-phone ring tones.