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.
Sounding Freedom and Liberation Podcast: Episode 2 with Berta Joncus
Joncus, B. (2026). Sounding Freedom and Liberation Podcast: Episode 2 with Berta Joncus. Digital or Visual Media https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/podcasts/sounding-freedom-and-liberation-podcast-episode-2/
2026
View OutputLondon: Concert Life. In: Handel in Context
Joncus, B., Coffey, H. (Ed.), & Landgraf, A. (Ed.) (Accepted/In press). London: Concert Life. In: Handel in Context. Cambridge University Press.
2025
View Output‘When Farce and when Musick can eke out a Play’: Ballad Opera and Theatre’s Commerce. In: The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music
Joncus, B., & da Sousa Correa , D. (Ed.) (2020). ‘When Farce and when Musick can eke out a Play’: Ballad Opera and Theatre’s Commerce. In: The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. Edinburgh University Press.
2020
View OutputKitty Clive, or The Fair Songster
Joncus, B. (2019). Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster. Boydell & Brewer Limited. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787445567
2019
View OutputLove In A Village : A Comic Opera
Joncus, B., Ozmo, Z., & Rogers, V. (Eds.) (2019). Love In A Village : A Comic Opera. (OPERA, an Edirom Music Encoding Initiative project). Baerenreiter Verlag.
2019
View Output‘Ballad Opera: Commercial Song in Enlightenment Garb. In: The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical
Joncus, B., Gordon, R. (Ed.), & Jubin, O. (Ed.) (2017). ‘Ballad Opera: Commercial Song in Enlightenment Garb. In: The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199988747.001.0001
2017
View OutputMusic and Representation. In: Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World.
Joncus, B., Burrows, D., & Marschner, J. (Ed.) (2017). Music and Representation. In: Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World. Yale Center for British Art.
2017
View OutputBallad Opera and British double entendre: Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor. In: , eds. Pratiques du timbre et de la parodie d'opéra en Europe (XVIe - XIXe siècles)/Timbre-Praxis und Opernparodie im Europa des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts
Joncus, B., Rogers, V., Le Blanc, J. (Ed.), & Schneider, H. (Ed.) (2014). Ballad Opera and British double entendre: Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor. In: , eds. Pratiques du timbre et de la parodie d'opéra en Europe (XVIe - XIXe siècles)/Timbre-Praxis und Opernparodie im Europa des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts. Georg Olms Verlag.
2014
View Output"Nectar If You Taste and Go, Poison If You Stay’: Struggling with the Orient in Eighteenth-Century British Musical Theater.” In: Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights
Joncus, B., & Warner, M. (Ed.) (2013). "Nectar If You Taste and Go, Poison If You Stay’: Struggling with the Orient in Eighteenth-Century British Musical Theater.” In: Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights. New York University Press.
2013
View OutputUnited voices formed the very perfection of harmony: Music and the Invention of Harriett Abrams (c1758–1821). In: Celebrity: The Idiom of a Modern Era
Joncus, B., Rogers, V., & Czennia, B. (Ed.) (2013). United voices formed the very perfection of harmony: Music and the Invention of Harriett Abrams (c1758–1821). In: Celebrity: The Idiom of a Modern Era. AMS Press.
2013
View Output