Joletta De Smedt

Joletta De Smedt studied at the conservatories of Maastricht and The Hague in the Netherlands and completed her master’s degree in Vocal Studies (Early Music) at the Mozarteum University Salzburg under the guidance of Ulrike Hofbauer. Further important teachers in her artistic development include Evelyn Tubb, Dorothee Mields, Lenie van den Heuvel, Sibylla Rubens, Peter Kooij, Frans Kokkelmans, Jill Feldman, Pascal Bertin, and Peter Van Heyghen.

She has developed a particular affinity for the interpretation of Renaissance and Baroque music and has appeared as a soloist at festivals including the MA Festival Bruges, the Utrecht Early Music Festival, the Salzburger Barockfest, and the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music.

Alongside her performance activity, she has long engaged in research on the musical heritage of the Franco-Flemish school. During her studies in Salzburg, she wrote her master’s dissertation under the supervision of Thomas Hochradner on the performance practice of the 16th-century Franco-Flemish chanson, with a particular focus on the works of Thomas Crecquillon.

At the same time, she founded the Renaissance ensemble Fabridore, whose performances are dedicated to this repertoire and aim to rediscover lesser-known works of early music. The ensemble’s historically informed approach — based on original sources and avoiding modern transcriptions — has also informed her scholarly work and raised new research questions.

In 2021, she began her doctoral studies, focusing on how historical phonetics and the symbolism of hexachordal solmisation shape rhetoric and text setting in Renaissance polyphony. Her doctoral project is supervised by Thomas Hochradner at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, as well as Birgit Lodes and Katharina Schöning at the University of Vienna.

Since 2024, Joletta De Smedt has been a lecturer and tutor in Academic Research Techniques at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.