The heart of this group of pages is an informal overview of a partial archive of the lifetime of work the great English flute player William Bennett ("WIBB") conducted on optimising the flute's "scale" – the positions of the tone holes. While my focus here is very much on Wibb's work, the process overall was strongly collaborative across both players and makers, many of whom appear by name in various papers. It built of course on the work of the renowned English flute maker Albert Cooper – who in turn took as his starting point the original pioneering work of Theobald Boehm, the nineteenth-century inventor of the modern flute. I have included short introductions to both Boehm and Cooper here.
The archive cormprises a large quantity of papers (mostly handwritten notes) by which Wibb documented his activity both tuning classic old flutes (primarily from the Louis Lot and other French workshops) to make them playable at modern pitch, and seeking to define the best possible scale to be employed by flute makers. Some of the papers are dated, reflecting not only Wibb's meticulousness in general, but also a strong sense of history and chronology that could be followed and studied by others.
Following Wibb's untimely death in 2022 the whole archive was promised to Shuichi Tanaka of the Altus flutemaking company, Mr Tanaka having worked particularly closely with Wibb over an extended period of time. However, Wibb's wife Michie Bennett allowed me to borrow a quantity of the papers (contained in one very large padded envelope) for me to scan. Wibb had some years earlier asked if I would "digitise" his scale work to ensure it was both preserved and made available in a modern practical form. These web pages and downloadable archive represent my attempt to fulfil that request.
1. BennettScale.zip 135MB. This comprises scans of every page available to me. As some papers were in the old English foolscap size, a little larger than the modern A4, I have taken multiple scans to capture all the content. I have arranged some papers into folders matching the chapters in the Bennett page, while all others are collected in a "general" folder.
2. FluteScales.xlsx.zip 20KB. This is a transcription of what I have seen as the essential information from the archive, in the form of a multi-page spreadsheet in the Microsoft Excel format. This can be read by all standard spreadsheet software on MacOS and Linux as well as Windows. The first tab Basics uses the automatic recalculation facility to enable a Basic Scale to be computed for a range of pitch standards. As a spreadsheet is by its nature user-editable I suggest users keep a reserve copy of the original in case of accidental deletions of data.
Small caveat: I am by no means an expert Excel programmer. This is the one file that may see frequent updates over time.
3. See the Cooper chapter for information on a downloadble scan of Cooper's booklet "The Flute" (1st Edition).
Resources.
The flute world is very well served by a host of specialist books on history, technique, science, and biographies. Thankfully there is now one which anyone reading these pages will want, which embraces all those topics and more.
"Wibb – A Flute For life", Edward Blakeman, publ. Tony Bingham, ISBN 978-0-946113-10-1
In these pages it is simply referred to as the "Wibb" book.
Richard Dobson. May 2025.