Heckelphone / Bass Oboe Repertoire

by Peter Hurd, reorganized and amended by Holger Hoos, editor-in-chief since 2020

version 2, 1 February 2022

This collection is based on the catalogue of musical works requiring heckelphone or bass oboe instrumentation assembled by Peter Hurd beginning in 1998. For this new edition, the original version of the repertoire list has been edited for accuracy, completeness and consistency, and it has been extended with a number of newly discovered pieces. A description of version 1.2 of the collection and the methodology used to assemble it has been published in:

   Holger H. Hoos and Peter Hurd:
   A New Look at the Repertoire for Heckelphone and Bass Oboe
   The Double Reed, Volume 44, No. 4, 115-137, 2021.

A German translation has also been published:

   Holger H. Hoos and Peter Hurd:
   Das Repertoire für Heckelphon und Baritonoboe
   'rohrblatt 36, Heft 4, 141-154, 2021.

Some entries could not (yet) be rigorously verified for accuracy; these were included nonetheless, to provide leads for future investigation, but are marked clearly. Pieces were selected for inclusion based solely on the use of heckelphone, bass oboe or lupophone, without any attempt at assessing their artistic merit. Arrangements of pieces not originally intended for these instruments were included (clearly marked as such) when there was clear evidence that they had found a significant audience.

The authors gratefully acknowledge contributions by Crawford Best, Ulrich Brokamp, Michael Finkelman, Francis Firth, Alain Girard, Thomas Hiniker, Robert Howe, Gunther Joppig, Georg Otto Klapproth, Mark Perchanok, Andrew Shreeves and Michael Sluman.

Complete repertoire list   [PDF version · statistics]

New in version 2   [PDF version · statistics]

Note: Version 2 includes 71 newly discovered pieces by 54 composers; 45 of these pieces were written for heckelphone, 27 for bass oboe, and 3 for lupophone (with some pieces leaving a choice between several of these instruments). Furthermore, several entries from the previous version have been amended, corrected or improved.

Heckelphone repertoire   [PDF version · statistics]

Piccolo heckelphone repertoire   [PDF version · statistics]

Bass oboe repertoire   [PDF version · statistics]

Lupophone repertoire   [PDF version · statistics]

Repertoire for multiple heckelphones   [PDF version]

Repertoire for multiple bass oboes   [PDF version]

Note: So far, our collection contains no pieces for multiple lupophones, and only a single piece for multiple piccolo heckelphones (Carl Orff's 1923 adaptation of Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, which we'd love to see performed or recorded).

Repertoire for heckelphone (chronological)

Repertoire for bass oboe (chronological)

Version history (including all earlier versions of this collection)


To suggest additions or corrections to the repertoire list, please contact heckelphone@gmx.net.
All rights reserved by Peter Hurd and Holger H. Hoos, 2022.