Paris Conservatoire Contest Pieces

The Paris Con­ser­va­toire’s annu­al con­cours (con­test) has added a great num­ber of solo works to the bas­soon’s reper­toire. From 1797 until 2011, these con­cours award­ed prizes to the top-ranked stu­dents in each dis­ci­pline. Attain­ing a pre­miere prix (first prize) prac­ti­cal­ly guar­an­teed the musi­cian a good job, and at var­i­ous times also earned the play­er a new instru­ment, musi­cal scores, and/or money.

For the first cen­tu­ry of the Con­ser­va­toire’s exis­tence, the pieces for the com­pe­ti­tion were most­ly writ­ten by the bas­soon pro­fes­sors (Wil­lent-Bor­dog­ni, Cokken, Jan­court, etc.). The “gold­en age” of con­cours pieces was 1898–1984, dur­ing which the Con­ser­va­toire most­ly com­mis­sioned new works from estab­lished com­posers. After 1985, new works were only occa­sion­al­ly ordered, and Alexan­dre Ouzounof­f’s NAIROBI, la nuit of 1999 seems to have been the last new­ly-com­mis­sioned work for bas­soon. The main table below is a list of the known bas­soon morceaux de con­cours for the years 1824–2010. Infor­ma­tion for the years 1825–1834, 1837–1839, and 2011 sad­ly isn’t avail­able. There was no con­cours in 1871, due to the Fran­co-Pruss­ian War.¹Leon Letellier and Édouard Flament, “Le Basson,” in Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire, ed. Albert Lavignac, Part 2, Vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Delgrave, 1925): 1593.

After 2011, the Con­ser­va­toire’s exam­i­na­tion process changed, and it stopped award­ing prizes as such. Accord­ing to  Marie Boichard, who com­plet­ed her stud­ies with Gilbert Audin at the Con­ser­va­toire in 2019, the  Prix de License is now the clos­est thing to the old con­cours. This typ­i­cal­ly occurs at the end of a stu­den­t’s third year of study, con­sists of a big pub­lic recital, and includes at least one required piece.² Marie Boichard, e-mail message to author, December 29, 2022.  Stu­dents who pass this earn the degree of DNSPM (Diplôme Nation­al Supérieur Pro­fes­sion­nel de Musi­cien), and are eli­gi­ble to go on to mas­ter’s study.³“Diplômes,” Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de dance de Paris, https://www.conservatoiredeparis.fr/fr/diplomes Sophie Levy, the Con­ser­va­toire’s Archives Man­ag­er, has also called atten­tion to the end-of-first-year exam in the mas­ter’s pro­gram, which occurs at rough­ly the same time in a stu­den­t’s stud­ies as the con­cours did under the old sys­tem.⁴Sophie Levy, e-mail message to author, March 22, 2019. Boichard though points out that this is a rel­a­tive­ly minor exam, which is not open to the pub­lic. In any case, par­tial lists of the required pieces for both of these exams are pro­vid­ed in sep­a­rate tables at the bot­tom of the page.

The bulk of the infor­ma­tion for the years 1824–1984 is tak­en from Kris­tine Fletcher’s book, The Paris Con­ser­va­toire and the Con­test Solos for Bas­soon, to which I added just a few minor details.⁵Kristine Klopfenstein Fletcher, The Paris Conservatoire and the Contest Solos for Bassoon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). Fletcher’s book is one of the great bas­soon ref­er­ence works, but it has long been out of print and copies are hard to come by today. The sim­ple list below pro­vides only a small frac­tion of the wealth of infor­ma­tion in Fletcher’s book— seek out a copy of it in a uni­ver­si­ty library if you want more details about the Con­ser­va­toire, the con­cours, or any of the indi­vid­ual works or com­posers. If you have access to Pro­Quest Dis­ser­ta­tions and The­ses, her dis­ser­ta­tion pro­vides much—but not all—of the same infor­ma­tion. Infor­ma­tion for the years 1986–2004 comes from Jef­frey Lyman’s arti­cle “The Morceaux de Con­cours for Bas­soon Since 1984: A Parisian Tra­di­tion Con­tin­ues.“⁶Jeffrey Lyman, "The Morceaux de Concours for Bassoon Since 1984: A Parisian Tradition Continues," The Double Reed 28, no. 2 (2005): 101-105. If you’re an IDRS mem­ber (which I’d high­ly rec­om­mend), you should be able to access the arti­cle here. Ryan Romine was kind enough to fill in 1985 for me, from his own cor­re­spon­dence with bas­soon­ist Frédéric Bouteille.⁷Frédéric Bouteille, e-mail message to Ryan Romine, May 5, 2012.

For infor­ma­tion post-2004, I’m indebt­ed to both Con­ser­va­toire archivist Sophie Levy and bas­soon­ist and Con­ser­va­toire alum­na Marie Boichard. Levy pro­vid­ed a list of con­cours pieces for the years 2005–2010, a brief expla­na­tion of the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of the award­ing of prizes after 2011, and a list of the works used for the end-of-first-year Mas­ter’s exam for 2012–2018.⁸Sophie Levy, e-mail message to author, March 22, 2019. Boichard clar­i­fied the new degree pro­grams and sup­plied a list of the pieces used for the Prix de License for 2014–2022.⁹Marie Boichard, e-mail message to author, January 4, 2023

Some notes on this list: