Dr Berta Joncus, BA (New York), MA (Bonn), DPhil (Oxon)
Dr. Berta Joncus is Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths and a Research Associate of the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. From 2004 to 2008 she was a lecturer in music at St Anne’s and St Hilda’s colleges of Oxford University, where she also completed a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2004-07) and her DPhil degree (1999-2004). Before studying at Oxford, she was an editor at the New Grove Dictionary of Music, working with Stanley Sadie. She took her MA at the University of Bonn, Germany and worked earlier as professional singer after finishing a performance degree at the Franz Schubert Conservatory of Vienna.
Grants & awards
John Rich and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage: Commerce, Magic and Management
An Interdisciplinary Conference, Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. Conference organizer and director (with Jeremy Barlow). Proceedings to be published by the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society. John Rich website.
Funding awarded by public and private sources.
c. £18,000
25-27 Jan 2008
John Fell OUP Research Fund
Project Designer and Applicant. Ballad Operas and their Music, 1728-1760: An Electronic Catalogue. Support related to bid for external funding
£17,907
Oct 2006
British Academy Small Research Grant
Project Designer and Applicant. Ballad Operas and their Music, 1728-1760: An Electronic Catalogue. Seedcorn grant
£7,500
Dec 2004
Other Awards:
Research and Development Fund Small Grants Scheme, University of Oxford (March 2006). American Musicological Society Membership and Professional Development Travel Awards (October 2006). British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship (July 2004). Handel Institute Research Award (October 2002). Arts and Humanities Research Board Postgraduate Award (July 2000)
Keynote lectures
‘“Poison if you taste and go, Nectar if you stay”: Struggling with the Orient in Eighteenth-Century British Musical Theatre’, Staging the East in the British Theatre: the Long Eighteenth Century and Now, Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds (June 2010)‘Singers and their Composer Handel’, Baroque Festival, Perth (Sept 2009)
Pre-Concert Talk, Barbican, Handel, Arianna in Creta (May 2009)
‘Staging the Ballad’, John Bird Lectures, Cardiff University (April 2008)
Conferences
Conference Convener with Jeremy Barlow, John Rich and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage: Commerce, Magic and Management, An Interdisciplinary Conference, Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Jan 2008, London. John Rich 2008 [incl. video clips of performance]
‘Music for the Common Man: Handel, Purcell and London’s eighteenth-century Entertainments’, Seventy-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Nov 2009, Philadelphia
'This glorious Approbation of Sounds’: Handel, Purcell and London’s Eighteenth-Century Entertainments, Purcell, Handel & Literature, Nov 2009, London
Television and video output
Interview, podcast, film, press text: Ian Bostridge and the Three Tenors: Beard, Borosini, Fabri, CD, recording project and tour (EMI, 2010)
BBC Radio 3: CD Review, guest presenter about recent releases of vocal music by Rameau, Pergolesi, Haydn and others, with presenter Andrew McGregor, 13 March 2010
BBC Radio 3: Performance on 3, Handel’s cantatas, presenter Catherine Bott, 26 Oct 2009
BBC Radio 3: Pre-Proms Event to Handel’s Samson, with conductor Harry Bicket and presenter Catherine Bott, 20 Aug 2009
BBC Radio 3: Music Matters, Handel’s Riccardo Primo, presenter Petroc Trelawny 16 April 2009
BBC Radio 3: Building a Library, Handel’s Messiah, 11 April 2009
BBC Radio 3: Music Matters, Bach Cantata Series at the Royal Academy of Music, with Jonathan Freeman-Atwood and presenter Tom Service, 14 Jan 2009
Papers presented
Speaker Graduate Colloquia: Producing Stars in Dramma per Musica
23 Jan 2007, Oxford
Symposium Speaker Women in Eighteenth-century Opera: Image and Power
Object or Agent: Divas and the Eighteenth-Century Stage
17 Nov 2006, Oxford
Twelfth Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music
‘Charm'd with the sprightly Innocence of Nell': Re-reading The Devil to Pay
28 July 2006 Warsaw
Symposium Speaker Staging the Feminine: The Arts of the Prima Donna 1720-1920
Object or Agent? The Diva and Star Production
15 July 2006, Leeds
Forty-second Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association
‘This each One proves who hears thy heavenly Strains': Imagining Kitty Clive (1711-1785)
14 July 2006, Nottingham
Thirty-fifth Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
‘Curse them all for a Parcel of Italian Bitches': The Seduction of Mimicry on the Mid-Eighteenth-Century London Stage
4 Jan 2006, Oxford
Seventy-first Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society
‘Charm'd with the sprightly Innocence of Nell': Re-reading The Devil to Pay
23 Feb 2005, Washington DC
Fortieth Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association
Eating Pigeon-Pye: Handel and the ‘Sweet Bird' of Drury Lane
13 Nov 2004, Birmingham
Sixty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society
A Star is Born: Kitty Clive and Female Representation in Eighteenth-Century English Musical Theatre
15 Nov 2003, Houston
Research interests
Her research focuses on the eighteenth-century London stage, European vocal music, European popular music before 1800 and, more generally, how vocal stars of the past produced their music and were produced by it. Her research is informed by her background as a singer and her work as a music critic for the BBC. Through her teaching and research, she seeks to cross boundaries of eras, disciplines, media and traditional musical scholarship.
Selected publications
Monographs:
Kitty Clive, Goddess of Mirth: Creating a Star through Song (1728–1765) (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming)
Electronic resources:
Ballad Operas Online (BOPO), BOPO website
Edited Books:
with Jeremy Barlow, ‘The Stage’s Glory’: John Rich (1692-1761) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010)
with Melania Bucciarelli, Music as Social and Cultural Practice: Essays in Honour of Reinhard Strohm (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2007)
Journal Articles:
‘“To propagate Sound for Sense: Music for Diversion and Seduction at Ranelagh Gardens’, London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present, 38/1 (2013), in press ISSN 0305-8034
‘“In Wit Superior as in Fighting”: Kitty Clive and the Conquest of a Rival Queen’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 72/4 (2010), forthcoming
‘“Ich bin eine Engländerin, zur Freyheit geboren”: Blonde and the Enlightened Female in Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail’, Opera Quarterly, 27/1-2 (New York: OUP, 2011)
‘“Clad without Disguise’: Imagining Kitty Clive (1711-1785)”, Music in Art, 34/1–2 (2009), in press
‘Handel at Drury Lane: Ballad Opera and the Production of Kitty Clive’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 131/2 (2006), 179–226
‘One God, so many Farinellis: Mythologizing the Star Castrato’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28/3 (2005), 437–96 [special issue: Farinelli]
‘“His Spirit is in Action Seen”: Milton, Mrs. Clive and the Simulacra of the Pastoral in Comus’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 2/1 (2005), 7–40
CD Collaborations and Sleeve Notes:
Ian Bostridge and the Three Tenors: Beard, Borosini, Fabri (EMI, 2010) Youtube clip
Handel in the Pleasure Gardens, L’Avventura London, dir. Zak Ozmo (Oppella Nova Records, 2011) Concert Tour and CD
Reviews:
‘Kathryn Lowerre, Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 1695-1705’, Early Music, 39 (2011)
‘Martha Feldman’s Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths Eighteenth-Century Italy’, Opera Quarterly, 26/2 (New York: OUP, 2010)
‘Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, eds, The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702-1711: A Facsimile Edition’, Eighteenth-Century Music 6/1 (2008), 133–35
‘Women's Song in Georgian England’, Early Music, 37 (2009), 479-81 [review of Leslie Ritchie, Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance (2008)]
Book Sections:
‘The Assemblage of every female Folly’: Kitty Clive (1711-1785) and Ballad Opera’, Women of Fashion: Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England and Eighteenth-Century England in Popular Culture, ed. Tiffany Potter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011)
with Vanessa Rogers, ‘Ballad Opera and British double entendre: Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor’, Die Praxis des Timbre in verschiedenen europäischen Kulturen: Eine musikalische Praxis zwischen Oralität und Schriftlichkeit, ed. Herbert Schneider (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2011)
with Vanessa Rogers, “United voices formed the very perfection of harmony”: Music and the Invention of Harriett Abrams (c1758-1821)”, Celebrity: The Idiom of a Modern Era, ed. Bärbel Czennia (New York: AMS Press, 2010), in press
with Vanessa Rogers, ‘Beyond The Beggar’s Opera: John Rich and English Ballad Opera’, ‘The Stage’s Glory’: John Rich (1692-1761) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010) , in press
‘Private Music in Public Spheres: Chamber Cantata and Song’, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Simon Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 513-40
‘Producing Stars in dramma per musica’, Music as Social and Cultural Practice: Essays in Honour of Reinhard Strohm, ed. Melania Bucciarelli and Berta Joncus (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 275-93
Exhibition Catalogue:
‘“Curse them all for a Parcel of Italian Bitches”: The Prima Donna versus the English Singer-Actress’, Handel and the Divas, Handel House Museum Catalogue, Exhibition May–Nov 2008
Research Tools:
‘Ballad Operas Online (BOPO): Tuning in to Eighteenth-Century Popular Song’, A Handbook for Studies in 18th-century English Music, Part 18: Ballad Opera, ed. Michael Burden (Oxford: Burden & Cholij, 2010)
‘Communication: Ballad Operas Online’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 6 (2009), 302-3
Dictionary Entries:
‘Ballad Opera’, ‘Beard, John’, ‘Beggar’s Opera’, ‘Clive, Catherine’, ‘Gay, John’, The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia, ed. David Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
‘Clive, Catherine’, Handel-Lexikon, ed. Hans-Joachim Marx (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2010), in press
Critic, Consultant:
Scientific Committee Member. Fourteenth Biennial International Conference, on Baroque Music (Belfast, 2010)
Editorial Board Member, Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009–present)
Academic Advisor. Handel and the Divas, Handel House Museum, 30 April–16 Nov 2008. Interviews include BBC Radio 4, Midweek Programme
Annual Awards Jury Member, BBC Music Magazine
Critic. BBC Music Magazine. Renaissance and Baroque music
Critic. International Record Review. Renaissance and Baroque music