Dr Berta Joncus

Berta is a musicologist, PhD supervisor, and impassioned advocate for lost voices. She created and is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project Abolition Song and its Legacies. In this multi-disciplinary undertaking, musicians and scholars explore the previously unknown repertory of British anti-slavery song (1787–c1830), the activist communities that generated it, and the perspectives and music of Black people of the time.

A multi-linguist, Berta specializes in celebrity, music, and theatre in European traditions before 1830. In her research, Berta shows that the artistry of performers as well composers inheres in the scores of historical music; teasing out these contributions enriches performances of that music today and reveals the social imperatives from which its creators struggled to break free in their own day. Berta’s monograph Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster (2019) explains how Clive’s creative practice shaped compositions conceived for her – including a bespoke passage in Handel’s 1743 Messiah – and how she later colluded in silencing her own high-style song to avoid being cancelled altogether. The Fair Songster garnered high praise, with Opera News extolling its evocation of a ‘theatrical world at once remote and familiar, and a star who used and was abused by that same system’.  Berta’s expertise in critical music editorship includes her 2020 edition for Bärenreiter of the 1762 pastiche opera Love in a Village. This remains the only digital hybrid critical score – a bound volume with online primary sources and critical apparatus – of an English musical stage work.

Berta designed ASaiL so that its music-making would illuminate its academic work, and vice versa. On each of six days over 24 months from October 2024, ASaiL partner institutions the British Library and the Handel Hendrix House are respectively hosting morning seminars for a team of scholars and evening concerts attended by those scholars and invited guests. The scholars, recruited from the disciplines of art, music, history, and literature, are creating an open-access essay collection to be issued online and as a book by an academic press. The concerts are co-curated by Berta, who moderates the post-concert discussion between artists and audience members. They the Guildhall Recording & Audio Visual team to make world-premiere recordings of anti-slavery songs for the scholars’ use. The concerts also feature readings from Black writers, and the music of Black maestri and of white British composers transmitting African musical practices, from the period 1787–1830. 

Outside her academic work, Berta is co-editor of Music & Letters (Oxford University Press), a critic and awards jurist for BBC Music Magazine, an occasional guest presenter on BBC Radio 3 (latest podcast available here), and a member of the Handel Institute Council and of the Continuo Foundation’s Advisory Panel.  Her 100-plus outputs for academic and general audiences until 2024, which include journal articles, book chapters and public talks, are listed and described here.