The Paris Con­ser­va­toire has, through its annu­al con­cours (con­test), added a great num­ber of works to the bas­soon’s solo reper­toire. Recent­ly, I found myself won­der­ing how many of these works have been uploaded to IMSLP. 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). I was lucky enough to buy one of Dr. 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. So, I’m post­ing it on my site today.

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. “Con­cer­to”). 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. I’ll keep work­ing to track these down and make them avail­able. If you have orig­i­nal print­ings of any of them, please get in touch!

The table of con­test pieces needs a lit­tle extra space, so I’ve put it on its own page. You can get there either via the “Resources” tab above, or sim­ply by click­ing the image of the table below:

Paris Con­ser­va­toire Con­test Pieces—click to view the entire table