The Bennett Scale - a partial archive
"A different colour on every note".
(l to r: William Bennett, Marcel Moyse, Michael Dobson)
This section is the one I am allowing myself despite it not having anything specific to do with flute scales. It is a more personal reflection on the examples I experienced of Wibb's infectious enthusiasm for all aspects of the flute, his very practical generosity, and support for a young and emerging player and aspiring flute maker.
I have included my father in this piece for reasons that will become clear. He trained as an oboeist - becoming principal oboe in the London Philharmoic Orchestra during the war years, after just one term as a student at the Royal Academy of Music. So I was born into a very actively musical family. And my father, of course, knew everyone who was anyone in the musical world.
Later, in the early 1960s, he was a founder member of Yehudi Menuhin's orchestra, soon to be renamed the "Bath Festival Orchestra". He also moved into conducting, forming his own orchestra, the Thames Chamber Orchestra, putting on, at first, regular concerts in Kingston Parish Church, but soon also in the newly opened Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH, a venue that opened up so many opportunities for chamber orchestras at that vital time in London) and elsewhere.
My earliest memory of Wibb, when I was around fifteen (lets say, 1969), was when my father brought me along on a visit to Wibb's home in Wimbledon. We climbed the stairs to a room that was clearly his workshop, complete with a lathe, and he was in the process of soldering a flute lipplate onto a headjoint tube. Not something I was expecting at all. Once I recovered my power of speech, I suggested "I expect you will be playing that in a few hours". Turning to me with that twinkle in the eye that everyone who knew him would recognise, he said in one of his characteristic deep Wibb voices, "ten minutes!".
Wibb (still a relatively new young professional in the London scene) was the flute player my father always booked for his orchestra. And of course not only in the orchestra, also often in front of it as a concerto soloist. I was often tagging along to rehearsals for this and that, so I saw much more of Wibb than a teenage aspiring flute player might at all reasonably expect. The quotation at the top of this page is my father's explanation to me of how Wibb approached his music.
So it was that one afternoon, when I was seventeen or early eighteen, I was on the upper deck of a bus into Central London to join my father at the QEH. I happned to spot what looked very much like a piccolo in the window of an antique shop. I of course mentioned it to Wibb, and he immediately swung into action. We drove directly to the shop to check it out.
It proved to be a nice open-G# Rudall Carte piccolo, sharp pitch, and Wibb paid £10 for it for me there and then (I would of course pay him back, which for someone still basically on "pocket money" would take a little time). He then told me what to do to make it playable: take it to the wood specialist Ted Planas to extend the head joint tenon, and he also guided me through the process of adding plasticine to certain tone holes – as the most routine and commonplace thing to do.
(Ted Planas was a genius maker/restorer specialising in clarinets, and like Albert Cooper he also worked in a small shed, with a Myford ML7 lathe dominating the space. He recommended it to me as the machine to get, and in the fullness of time I did just that.)
And yet this piccolo story has a second chapter. One of the first professional engagements I had after finishing at the Royal College of Music was (of all things) piccolo / 3rd flute for the Sadlers Wells touring ballet, in Bristol for two weeks. The principal dancers included Wayne Sleep and Lesley Collier. The main work in the repertoire was Prokofiev's masterpiece Romeo and Juliet. There is one pretty piccolo solo which gave me some trouble, as it requires a very delicate, quiet top B, which I really couldn't find securely on the Rudall Carte (maybe it was the plasticine).
Wibb's extraordinarily generous solution was to lend me, for the whole two weeks, his silver open-G# Haynes piccolo, on which all such things were easy. Now maybe that wasn't his primary piccolo (I suspect a Louis Lot held that position), but I think few other professional musicians would lend out an obviously valuable instrument for that long. I also suspect that I never really thanked him as much as I should have.
I haven't so far mentioned the subject of lessons from Wibb. I had just one before starting at the RCM, in which he gave me his great "note-bending" exercise, described as starting off as a technical experiment to find out just how far he could bend notes up or down to play some archetypal old French flute in tune; he discovered that it proved to be a powerful tone development exercise. Of course this set me up for my whole three years at the College, and beyond. After leaving the RCM, I was fortunate to be given six more lessons, at approximately four-week intervals. Wibb's arrangement was that I paid for them by "doing work" on his flutes in his basement workshop.
The real point of these stories is that while I tell them purely from my own experience, which may imply some sort of special treatment, this was how Wibb worked with everyone who shared his love of the flute, in whatever aspect, whether playing at the highest level, or making flutes, or tuning flutes, helping students and others with needs they barely knew they had. One of Wibb's famous principles was "generosity of sound". It is as good a description of his playing and teaching as any, but it grew from a deeper generosity in life which illuminated and beautified the lives of people too numerous to count.
Richard Dobson. May 2025.