Sounding Freedom and Liberation Podcast: Episode 2 with Berta Joncus

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.