William Bennett is a British flute player, who has played with most of the major British orchestras. He also has a career as a soloist. He developed an instrument, the 'flauto di bassetto', which extends the range of the flute down a minor third, and one of his recordings, Mozart's Concerto K 218, features this. In the late 1960's, his work on flute acoustics, in collaboration with other British flutists and the British flute maker Albert Cooper, helped vastly to improve the intonation of the modern flute. The resulting method of tuning is commonly called the Bennett-Cooper scale. He was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the National Flute Association in 2002, and he was appointed an OBE by the Queen in 1995. He teaches flute at the Royal Academy of Music and was a key influence on the flutemaker Altus [1][2]
