Berta is a scholar, critic, editor, and public musicologist. Her outputs bring archival and practice research together with critical and source studies to deepen our understanding of music. Knowing that artistic creation is subject to multiple forces, she maps the artistry, constraints, and social networks undergirding works of the past both familiar and previously unknown.

Focusing initially on Early Music repertories, 18-century European opera and vocal music especially, Berta has illuminated music’s role in producing celebrities and in giving performance artists agency both material and artistic. Her monograph Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster (2019) is a bold re-reading of the career of this breakthrough singer-actor (1711-85). For the first time it showed music as the medium by which Clive was able to seize artistic control of entire productions; it also revealed the extent to which Clive was aided by Irish and same-sex communities in particular.

More recently, Berta has been active in computational musicology. Her 2020 edition for Bärenreiter of the 1762 pastiche opera Love in a Village is the first-ever critical hybrid score – that is, a bound publication with notes and digitized primary sources online – of an English work.

Since 2018 Berta’s research has mostly been on music and Black cultural heritage in Britain from 1700 to 1830, on which she has published, given keynotes, organized concerts, and convened conferences. Her HMRC-funded project Abolition Song and its Legacies (ASaiL), a two-year partnership between the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the British Library, and the Handel & Hendrix house, is an outgrowth of this work.

Berta was appointed to the University of London in 2009; she was made Reader in 2020. From 2007 to 2009 she lectured at St Anne’s and St Hilda’s colleges of Oxford University, where she had been a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2004–2007) and earned her DPhil degree (1999–2004).

Before Oxford, Berta worked with Stanley Sadie an editor at the New Grove Dictionary of Music. She took her MA at the University of Bonn, Germany. As a young adult Berta worked as a professional singer, after finishing a performance degree at the Franz Schubert Conservatory of Vienna. Her first job in music was as a child chorister in the Canadian Opera Company.

Berta is Principal Investigator and Guildhall Research Project Lead of her AHRC-funded project, Abolition Song and its Legacies (ASaiL).

Through this project – a two-year partnership between the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the British Library, and the Handel & Hendrix house – a team of scholars and a team of musicians will together investigate and bring to performance a previously unknown British art song repertory championing Abolitionism.

Berta is co-editor of Music & Letters, a critic for BBC Music Magazine, a member of the Handel Institute Council, an Expert Advisory Panel member for the Continuo Foundation, and serves on the BBC Music Magazine awards jury.

Berta welcomes the opportunity to supervise PhD students both within and outside practice-based research. Herself an eighteenth-century specialist, she has supervised PhD candidates on Early Modern Florentine nunneries, the Lieder of Fanny Hensel, 20th-century Serbian art song, music as a tool of conquest in colonial Paraguay, and Qing emissaries’ encounters with Western music.

https://www.classical-music.com/author/berta-joncus