My main fields of research are the history of aesthetics, the aesthetics of music, affectivity, phenomenology and hermeneutics. An earlier focus was on the concept of Stimmung (mood, attunement), and I have later developed these studies into related concepts such as atmosphere and resonance. During the latest years, I have devoted myself to the Swedish era of Gustavian culture, spanning over a broad spectrum: from music and opera to literature, architecture and gardening as well as the affectivity related to social and cultural change.

I am a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 2015 (member of the board since 2023)

A selection of my publications:

Monographies

Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015

Doctoral thesis

Musical Attunement: The concept and phenomenon of Stimmung in music, PhD thesis, Department of Musicology and Performance Studies, Stockholm University 2012

Academic articles, peer-reviewed, in journals/books

‘On Patheme: Affective Shifts and Gustavian Culture’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, forthcoming.

”Värld, tecken, affekt: Konst- och populärmusik i von Triers ’depressionstrilogi’”, in: Klassisk musik för en medialiserad värld: Föreställningar, förhandlingar och representationer av den västerländska konstmusiken i det samtida mediesamhället, red. Tobias Pontara och Åsa Bergman, Göteborg: Makadam, forthcoming.

‘An Academy of Academies: The Cultural Transfer of the ‘Academy of Music’ to Sweden’, in: The Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, ‘Global Intersections in the Music of the 18th Century’, ed. Beverly Wilcox, Steglein Publishing, forthcoming.

‘Music’s Attunement: Stimmung, Mood, Atmosphere’, in: The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, eds. Jonathan De Souza, Benjamin Steege, and Jessica Wiskus, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

‘Cool Nature: Utopian Landscapes in Sweden 1780–1840’, Anna Albrektson, Mikael Ahlund, Sara Ekström, Johanna Ethnersson Pontara, Elisabeth Mansén, Vera Sundin, Meike Wagner & Erik Wallrup, Sjuttonhundratal: Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2022.

‘Grand Style, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Elaborations of a Concept’, in: Heidegger and Music, eds Casey Rentmeester and Jeff R. Warren, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, pp. 75–90.

‘Fragment and Flow: On Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysus Opera’, in: Arts of Incompletion: Fragments in Words and Music, eds Walter Bernhart and Axel Englund, Words and Music Studies, vol. 18, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021, pp. 242–254.

‘The tune of the magic flute: on atmospheres and history’, in: Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds, eds Friedlind Riedel and Juha Torvinen, London & New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 202–217.

”Blicken i den gustavianska spegeln: Svensk musikvetenskap om tiden under Gustav III”, Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning/Swedish Journal of Music Research, vol. 101, 2019, pp. 75–101.

‘Against the Grain: Heidegger and Musical Attunement’, in: Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories, eds Birgit Breidenbach & Thomas Docherty, London & New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 202–217.

‘Song as Event: On Intermediality and the Auditory’, in: Power of the In-between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection, eds Sara Callahan et al., Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018, pp. 349–374.

‘Die dunkle Gegend der Stimmungen: Heidegger und Herder, Aufklärung und Politik’, in: Stimmungen und Vielstimmigkeit der Aufklärung, eds Silvan Moosmüller, Laure Spaltenstein & Boris Previšić, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017, pp. 336–353.

‘From Mood to Tone: Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Worlds’, selected from the 17th Nordic Musicological Congress 2015 for Danish Musicology Online, 2016, pp. 123–144.

Editorship

Emil Sjögen: En vägvisare, Anders Edling & Erik Wallrup (red.), Kungl. Musikaliska Akademiens skriftserie nr 154, Möklinta: Gidlund, 2022.

250: The Royal Academy of Music 1771–2021, trans. Donald MacQueen, Pia Bygdéus, Torbjörn Eriksson & Erik Wallrup (eds), The Royal Academy of Music Publication Series no. 148, Möklinta: Gidlund, 2021.

Blick, rörelse, röst: Festskrift till Cecilia Sjöholm, Rebecka Katz Thor & Erik Wallrup (red.), Södertörn Studies in Art History and Aesthetics no. 5, Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2021.

250: Kungl. Musikaliska Akademien 1771–2021, Pia Bygdéus, Torbjörn Eriksson & Erik Wallrup (red.), Kungl. Musikaliska Akademiens skriftserie nr 148, Möklinta: Gidlund 2020.

Notera tiden. 8 essäer om ljudkonst, dans och estetik [Noting time. 8 essays on sound art, dance and aesthetics], Erik Wallrup (ed.) Stockholm: Kungl. Musikaliska akademien, 1996.