Bell: Vocal Music

Composer Larry Bell has been awarded the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Charles Ives Award. His music has been widely performed in the United Sates and abroad by internationally known orchestras and ensembles. Bell received his DMA from The Juilliard School, working in composition with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions. He is chair of music theory at the New England Conservatory of Music Division of Preparatory and Continuing Education. This disc of Bell's song cycles begins with The Immortal Beloved based on the three letters Beethoven wrote to Antonie Brentano in July 1812. According to the composer, "The music was conceived from the point of view of the recipient of the letters.... Four Sacred Songs were designed as studies for a larger commissioned orchestral work entitled Sacred Symphonies. Each song is a setting of a familiar hymn tune text." Songs of Time and Eternity are based on a grouping of poems by Emily Dickinson on this theme. William Blake's late 18th-century Songs of Innocence and Experience "...is a famous example of an adult's perspective of the child. The child in these poems is rebellious, joyful, persistently playful, Christ-like, and always natural..." The work is written for children's chorus and orchestra.