Bassoon sheet music

Bass clef, tenor clef, and occasionally treble

The bassoon's working range spans more than three octaves, so a part sits in bass clef at the bottom and switches to tenor clef above roughly the D a tenth above middle C, to avoid a wall of ledger lines. A few late Romantic and twentieth-century parts push into treble clef at the extreme top.

None of this is optional knowledge — Mozart's concerto changes clef repeatedly. A beginner buying "easy bassoon solos" should check that the edition stays in bass clef; many graded books deliberately do, and say so.

Contrabassoon is a different part

The contrabassoon sounds an octave below written pitch and its parts are separately published. In orchestral sets it frequently shares a stave with bassoon 2 with the entries marked, which means buying "Bassoon II" may or may not give you the contra line. If you play contra, look for a part named as such.

What you can get free

The concerti by Vivaldi, Mozart and Weber are out of copyright, along with Milde's studies, the Weissenborn method and every orchestral part written before about 1930 — which is most of the standard orchestral literature. Modern editions of the Mozart in particular are still worth buying, because the cadenza and articulation choices vary considerably and free scans give you a nineteenth-century view of both.