Paul A. Bertagnolli
Associate Professor of Musicology

e-mail: pbertagnolli@uh.edu
office: MSM 217
office phone: (713)743-3144
address: 120 School of Music Bldg, Houston, TX 77204-4017

Paul A. Bertagnolli, associate professor of musicology at the Moores School of Music since 1998, specializes in the music of the common practice period. His experiences as musicologist, performer, and music journalist allow him to cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the origins of the classical style in the early eighteenth century through the maturation of romanticism at the end of the nineteenth. His broad background is reflected in his approach to classroom teaching and in recent course offerings: graduate seminars in performance practice, romantic song, Liszt and Wagner, and a comprehensive survey of western music; upper level classes in symphonic literature and the music of the classical and romantic periods; and for undergraduates, surveys of music history from antiquity through the nineteenth century, along with an introductory course for non-majors.

Bertagnolli earned a Ph. D. in musicology from Washington University in St. Louis, where he completed a dissertation on the abundant manuscript and published sources for the instrumental and choral music for Franz Liszt's Prometheus. His research was supported by grants from the Nussbaum Foundation, which enabled him to consult the composer's letters and music manuscripts at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, Germany, the Széchenyi National Library and the Liszt Memorial Research Centre in Budapest, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and a private estate in Germany's Rhineland, where he discovered a Liszt manuscript that had been missing for nearly 150 years.

Recent articles include "Liszt, Goethe, and a Musical Cult of Prometheus" (a literary analysis published in Analecta Lisztiana), plus a forthcoming study that challenges currently held opinions of the personal and working relationship between Liszt and Joachim Raff, a scribe who has often been credited with orchestrating some of Liszt's symphonic compositions, and an analysis of a previously unknown source for Liszt's first symphonic poem, Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne. Bertagnolli has presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the American Liszt Society, the Dvorák Centennial Symposium, and a conference entitled, "Franz Liszt and the Birth of Modern Europe," sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held at the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, Italy. An active member of the Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, he has read papers at regional meetings and served as member and chair of the chapter's committees.

During and prior to his doctoral studies in St. Louis, Bertagnolli cultivated a wide array of musical disciplines. While finishing his dissertation, he acquired experience in higher music education as the instructor of music theory at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois. Before moving to the Midwest, he completed several degree programs: a Master of Arts in music criticism from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario; a Master of Music in performance from Yale University's School of Music; and two bachelor's degrees from the University of Wyoming, one in performance, the other in music education. As a free-lance clarinetist in Missouri, Ontario, and Connecticut, he frequently played on solo and chamber recital series and in numerous orchestras. His clarinet teachers included Keith Wilson, Charles Russo, David Harmon, Richard Joiner, Ralph Strouf, and most formatively and fondly, the late Leon Russianoff. He was the instructor of clarinet, saxophone, and chamber music at the Neighborhood Music School and the Westport School of Music, respectively located in New Haven and Westport, Connecticut. In two seasons as a music critic, he contributed more than sixty feature articles and reviews to the New Haven Register, a local daily newspaper.