SweetwaterNOW congratulates the Class of 2019 Rock Springs High School Hall of Fame inductees. We will feature each inductee throughout the week leading up the banquet on Saturday, September 7. Profile features are brought to you by Tanner Family Dentistry.
Dr. Paul Bertagnolli – Distinguished Alumni
Born and raised in Rock Springs, Paul Bertagnolli graduated from RSHS as the salutatorian of the class of 1974. Previously he had attended Lincoln Elementary School and RS Junior High, first on B Street, then on Gobel Street, while spending summer vacations at his family’s ranch near Kemmerer.
He showed musical aptitude at an early age, but developed serious interest in playing the clarinet quite literally by chance when his name was drawn from a hat, and he received a scholarship to a music camp at the University of Wyoming. Guided by Rock Springs band directors John Novotny and Herman Prevedel, Paul participated in many public school music activities, including district festivals and the marching, concert, pep, and pit bands.
Higher Learning
He was also selected by audition to play in all-State and all-Northwest bands and orchestras. At RSHS he was involved in speech, theater, National Honor Society, and other academic activities, but he decided to major in music in college. Paul earned bachelor’s degrees in music performance and music education at Michigan State University and the University of Wyoming.
In 1980 he left Wyoming to pursue a master’s degree in performance at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He remained in New Haven for eight years as a freelance musician, playing the clarinet in numerous professional orchestras, teaching as many as 45 clarinet students per week at schools for the arts in New Haven and Westport, Connecticut, and contributing over 60 music reviews and feature articles to the local newspaper.
Standing outside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. 
The young protege gets in a little practice. 
PhD Hooding Ceremony at Washington University in St. Louis, 1998
His experiences as a music critic led him to undertake another master’s degree in music criticism at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where in 1990 he completed a thesis on the musical writings of the German opera composer Richard Wagner. He finished his education at Washington University in Saint Louis with a PhD in musicology, a scholarly discipline that emphasizes the study of music in historical and cultural contexts.
To write his PhD dissertation, Paul worked for months at a time at archives in Germany and Hungary, where he researched the orchestral and choral music of Franz Liszt, a classical composer best known during his lifetime and to this day as a piano virtuoso.
Onward and Upward
Upon graduating from Wash. U. in 1998, Paul was hired as assistant professor of musicology at the University of Houston, which boasts an enrollment of 45,000 students and recently achieved the Carnegie Foundation’s tier-one research status. To earn a promotion to associate professor in 2005, Paul wrote a book titled Prometheus in Music, tracing how the Greek myth of Prometheus was set to music by Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, and others.
He will be promoted to full professor upon completing another book on the piano music of Edward MacDowell, who was recognized during the late 1800s as America’s foremost composer of classical music. For the last 21 years, Paul has presented papers at musicology conferences throughout North America and Europe, and he has published some two dozen articles in musicology journals and other scholarly forums.
At UH, he teaches 10 different music history courses at the 650-student Moores School of Music, which attracts young performers, music educators, and composers from throughout the nation, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Paul chaired the School’s musicology division for 10 years and served two terms as president of the Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society.
Paul’s other interests include traveling, attending opera performances (especially at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City), vacationing at his cabin on the Big Sandy Opening, hiking in the Wind River Mountains, and, most importantly, spending time with his family and friends in Rock Springs and Laramie. He plans to retire to Rock Springs in the near future.
