Berta is working with leading artists, scholars and institutions to investigate music by and about Britain’s eighteenth-century Black community.
She organized a panel on this subject, presenting at the 2018 American Musicological Society Annual Meeting. Click here for the programme abstract.
She was co-convenor of the Concert and Workshop of 12 October 2017, Black Music: Its Circulation in Eighteenth-Century London, facilitated and hosted by the Historical Royal Palaces, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Handel & Hendrix in London Museum. This workshop will run again at the Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University on 25–26 April 2019, and be enriched by a concert of 18th– and early 19th-century songs about the British Abolitionist movement. These songs are Berta’s latest findings.
(Johann Joseph Zophany – Queen Charlotte – 1771)
Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World. Thursday, February 2, 2017 to Sunday, April 30, 2017 at the Yale Center for British Art.
Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World is a collaboration between Historic Royal Palaces and the Yale Center for British Art. Following its showing in New Haven, the exhibition will be on view at Kensington Palace from June 22 to November 12, 2017. Read more.
Berta contributed to the exhibition catalogue. The Guardian reviewed the catalogue: “In this brilliant book … a lineup of leading historians chart the myriad ways in which three individual women … helped refract its sunbeams over Georgian Britain … [and] we hear about the avant garde composers these women commissioned”.