Pianist, doctor of music and researcher Anu Lampela (née Vehviläinen) is a versatile actor in the art world. Lampela is interested in the hidden areas of art music and the issues which are not talked about out loud. In her activities, she has highlighted the artist's tacit knowledge and developed musician's education, especially at the university level.
The focus of the artistic work has been e.g. the works for piano as well as violin & piano by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937); Lampela has recorded the whole solo piano output for Alba Records.
Lampela works at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki as the head of the DocMus doctoral school and a university lecturer. She is a member of the board of the University of the Arts in the four-year period 2022–2025. Lampela has been appointed as the director of the Open Campus of the Uniarts Helsinki 1.8.2023 onwards.
Pianist, doctor of music and researcher Anu Lampela is a versatile actor in the art world. She works as the head of the DocMus doctoral school and a university lecturer at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. The job description includes art, research and teaching as well as various administrative tasks.
As an artist-researcher Lampela has studied recently artisthood, relationship with the musical work, relationship with the audience, piano practicing, presence, now-moment, Karol Szymanowski's piano music, playing orientation and physicality. Together with the actor-researcher Jussi Lehtonen, Vehviläinen has studied the mutual collisions between different art fields and between the art institution and actors outside of it; this study suggests development possibilities of interdisciplinary pedagogy. Lampela also studies high quality pianistic pedagogy together with professor Juha Ojala and pianist-pedagogue Niklas Pokki.
Between the years 2015–2020, Lampela was a member of the multidisciplinary research collective Silence Ensemble (dancer Kirsi Heimonen, visual artist Petri Kaverma, pianist AL). The group developed collaborative artistic research methods and further utilized the outcomes in their own artistic fields.
During the years 2009–2015, the program Open Artist & Dear Audience, organized by Lampela, operates with projects between the artist and the audience, aiming to open up the artist's work and artistic processes as well as to bring the audiences closer to the artist. For twenty years, Lampela has been collecting autoethnographic material from her own piano practice bringing the pain points of the Western art music tradition to the general discussion through artistic research.
