Peter Peitsalo

Introduction

Peter Peitsalo, DMus, University Lecturer, is responsible for research studies and teaches organ performance in the Church Music and Organ Department at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. He also supervises doctoral researchers within the Sibelius Academy’s doctoral programme and research centre. His doctoral degree, completed in 2000, focused on questions of music philology and performance practice in Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s chorale-based keyboard works.

In addition, Peter Peitsalo has published research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Finnish church and organ music and has edited some ten scholarly volumes. He also serves on the editorial board of the DocMus Research Publications series.

Peter Peitsalo has undertaken a range of academic expert and evaluation assignments at Nordic higher music education institutions and for the Swedish Research Council. From 2001 to 2008, he served as Head of the Church Music Department at the Sibelius Academy, and from 2012 to 2016, he held a fixed-term professorship in church music endowed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. In spring 2026, he was awarded the Organum Society’s rotating prize in recognition of his achievements as an organist, pedagogue, and researcher, as well as his distinguished contribution to the supervision of numerous research projects at master’s and doctoral levels.