In this episode of Sounding Freedom and Liberation we speak to Dr Berta Joncus and learn about Berta’s own personal experience of freedom and liberation through discovery of her own voice as a performer, and how this led to her research career. Berta tells us about eighteenth-century performer-celebrity Kitty Clive, who worked against cultural constraints to exercise musical and social freedom, and recovered her career by turning the “trash-talk” used against her to her own benefit. Learn also about the unknown repertoire of abolition song, a form of activism circulating in polite society of the eighteenth century—particularly among women—that appropriated the narratives of enslaved people and set them musically so as to engage sympathy and ultimately work towards the end of the slave trade.
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Biography
Dr Berta Joncus is a musicologist, and Research Project Lead at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Her research focuses in large part on Early Music repertories, including 18-century European opera and vocal music. Berta is an impassioned advocate for lost and marginalised voices, and most recently has been awarded a 24-month Arts and Humanities Research Council Curiosity Grant to lead an interdisciplinary network looking at abolition song and its legacies in Britain between 1787 and 1830. The network works in partnership with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the British Library, and the Handel Hendrix House.
Berta’s writing
Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster, Berta Joncus (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer 2019): https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/kitty-clive-or-the-fair-songster-9781783273461/
Links to accompany the episode
Abolition Song and its Legacies (ASail): https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/abolition-songs-and-its-legacies-asail
Project concerts at Handel Hendrix House, London
Concert 1, 9th January 2025: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKCLSZZPYE
Full programme: https://pure.gsmd.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/51740035/9.1.25_concert_prog_corrected.pdf
Concert 2, 19th May 2025: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9y0T3uTL3E
Full programme: https://pure.gsmd.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/52014526/19.5.2025_ASaiL_Programme.pdf
Concert 3, 8th September 2025: https://youtu.be/9-rqoYJOyhA
Full Programme: https://pure.gsmd.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/52014527/ASaiL_8_Sept_2025_Prog.pdf
Podcast hosts
Dr Férdia Stone-Davis: www.ferdiastonedavis.com
Dr Charissa Granger: https://sta.uwi.edu/fhe/dlcc/dr-charissa-granger
Podcast acknowledgements
The Sounding Freedom and Liberation music was composed by Samuel J. Wilson. Website: https://www.samueljwilson.com/profile
The Sounding Freedom and Liberation logo was designed by Pavlína Kašparová. Website: https://www.creativenun.com/bio
The Podcast was recorded at the Media Lab, the West Hub, Cambridge, and was edited by Mike Chivers
