Júlia Coelho: The Singing Harp

Dr. Júlia Coelho (D.M.A.) is a versatile scholar-performer-educator, active in performance, teaching, musicological research, and poetry and music writing. She is the owner and founder of PhilosMelodia, LLC, through which she teaches her music studio in Denton and performs regularly at a variety of musical events as Júlia Coelho: The Singing Harp and Duo/Trio/Quartet Bossa Nossa in Europe and in the US. She comes from Portugal and currently lives in Denton (Texas), after living in Italy and then Missouri.

PERFORMANCE WORK

With voice as her main instrument (soprano), Dr. Coelho is also a multi-instrumentalist, often playing the Gothic harp, psaltery, lyre, piano, vocal looper, and other instruments to accompanying her singing. She is a versatile musician performing a wide variety of repertoire spanning from Early and New Music, to Opera, Brazilian Bossa Nova, Portuguese Fado, and Sephardi Folk music.

She performs regularly in a variety of musical contexts and events, from formal concerts to recitals, concerts, festivals, weddings, services, etc. She records music professionally on a frequent basis and is featured in several albums and recording projects (see Albums). She has performed in several opera and chamber work concerts in the U.S. and in Europe and has won several performance awards at national and international competitions.

As a solo musician, she often performs as Júlia Coelho: The Singing Harp with voice and Gothic harp and serves at DUUF as their Hymn Leader and Musician since 2019. In an ensemble setting, she founded the Júlia Coelho: Duo/Trio/Quartet Bossa Nossa, focusing on the original roots of Brazilian Bossa Nova and Samba tunes, and performs often in Chamber Music settings with other musicians in Fine Arts repertoire.

(See Resumé for more information on performance experience and the Music section on her website).

EDUCATOR WORK: COLLEGE CLASSES & APPLIED LESSONS

As an educator, Dr. Coelho has over a decade of teaching experience in applied music, music history, music theory, and foreign languages.

College-Level Classes: At the University of North Texas, Dallas, she taught Music Appreciation / American Music classes, while also working as a Teaching Fellow in the Music History area at the University of North Texas, Denton. In the Summer, she works as an instructor for pre-college classes at UNT, namely the courses "Music in Culture and Society," "introduction to Philosophy," "Popular Music," "Music Appreciation," "Italian as a Foreign Language," and "European Portuguese Language and Culture."

Private Applied Music Lessons (PhilosMelodia): Dr. Coelho teaches private lessons in voice, piano, music theory, and composition (ages 3-70+), as well as group classes on musical theater and early childhood education (ages 2-12) through her music company PhilosMelodia, LLC.

Before founding her own company, she worked for music academies across the DFW area in Texas and, previously, at Presser Arts Center in Mexico, Missouri, CMP at MU, and sporadically in Portugal during Summer and winter seasons.

​ MUSICOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH WORK:

As a scholar / researcher / writer, she has publications in English, Portuguese, and Italian in Music History, Music Theory, and Philosophy (see publications section).

She has presented papers in the U.S. and in Europe at national, and international conferences on 16th-18th century Italian, German, Portuguese, and Brazilian music; music and disability; intersection of music and politics; early opera; rhetoric in music; among other topics. She has also presented several lecture-recitals and invited talks on the same topics, as well as music and rhetoric in the English renaissance, and Portuguese history, music, and politics.

Her Ph.D. dissertation and current larger research project is entitled "Representations of Disability in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera." For her D.M.A. dissertation she worked on Luso-Brazilian Sacred Music, completing a vocal-piano score edition of unedited Sacred work by 18th-century composer Marcos Portugal.

(See CV page for more detailed information on education, publications, conferences, and professional experience).

​​ CREATIVE WORK – MUSIC & POETRY WRITING:

Dr. Coelho writes poetry in Portuguese from the age of 9, now writing also in Italian, French, and English languages. She published an original book of poetry called Fragmentos de Infinito (2017; see publications). She wrote the poetry cycle for her forthcoming album O Tempo fora do Tempo, with music by Kory Reeder (2026).

Besides performing often her own arrangements, Dr. Coelho also creates meditation improvisatory-based music and originals in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Ladino, and Galician-Portuguese, from Medieval-style cantigas to Bossa Nova. She is currently preparing an album of originals, tentatively entitled Iberian Sounds and Songs of the Sea.

EDUCATION AND DEGREES:

Dr. Coelho holds a Doctorate in Musical Arts in Vocal Performance (Minor in Music Theory) from UNT. She earned 3 Masters’ degrees in Musicology, Opera, and Vocal Performance from the US (MU) and Italy (Conservatory Cimarosa), as well as a BA in Philosophy (minor in Foreign Languages) from and Portugal (FLUL). She is currently finishing a second doctoral degree, a Ph.D. Musicology (AbD, with a related field in Early Music).

Prior to her work in music, she studied Philosophy and Foreign Languages, teaching, translating, and researching in these two areas—a work that she continues today, extending it now to translation and research in musicology and music theory topics.

She completed her undergraduate degree in Lisbon (Portugal) and finished her last year in Salerno, Italy (2010) through the program ERASMUS. It was there that she began her music studies as a Fine Arts singer, continuing her academic and professional endeavors in music performance, research, and teaching. in the U.S. after 2014.