I started my search by pulling one of the great bassoon reference works off my shelf: Kristine Fletcher’s book The Paris Conservatoire and the Contest Solos for Bassoon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). Fletcher’s last extra copies when I was in grad school, but it’s difficult to get your hands on today, outside of university libraries. I made myself a spreadsheet of all the contest pieces, and set about searching IMSLP and copying links for pieces that have been posted there. Partway through this task, I realized that what I was creating had the potential to be of great use to others. When I initially checked IMSLP, only a dozen of these works (not counting Mozart, Vivaldi, and Weber) were available. I’ve uploaded an additional 4 pieces by Eugène Jancourt over the last week or so, and have one by Henri Büsser in process. Some of the 19 th-century works may never have been published, and many of them have titles that are probably too generic for positive identification (e.g. But, there are still another 20+ published works out there that are potentially in the public domain (at least in the US), and could be added. If you have original printings of any of them, please get in touch! I’ll keep working to track these down and make them available. You can get there either via the “Resources” tab above, or simply by clicking the image of the table below: The table of contest pieces needs a little extra space, so I’ve put it on its own page. Hindemith playing his Heckel bassoon, 1940 1 German composer Paul Hindemith wrote more than forty sonatas. In addition to at least one sonata for each standard orchestral woodwind, brass, and string instrument, he wrote for a number of less-common solo instruments, including the English horn, the viola d’amore, and the althorn. Although he was primarily a viola player, Hindemith owned and could play many of the instruments for which he wrote he apparently had a particular interest in the bassoon. An entry in the Heckel visitor’s log indicates that Hindemith purchased a bassoon from the firm on October 9, 1927. Hindemith wrote his Sonate for bassoon in 1938, during a tumultuous time in his life. Performances of his music had been banned in Germany in 1936, and in May 1938 he was one of the composers singled out for scorn at a Nazi exhibit of Entartete (Degenerate) Musik in Düsseldorf. He soon decided to leave Germany, and emigrated to Switzerland in September 1938.
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