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