Sean Bell: Revive the Leaden Strings

Field of study: Artistic Research

As a countertenor, Sean Bell performs his own arrangements of Early Music, which stay close to the source material’s text and melody, but use new instrumentation, harmonisation, and tonality. A synthesis of historical and contemporary performance makes up the core of his artistic practice. He sees his relationship to interpretation as a practice of Historically Informed Performance (the method used in Early Music, often shortened to HIP). However, the repertoire always acts as material with which to create, without a preconceived idea of what the result will be. Bell works broadly and exploratively with all these composite elements in order to embody the interpretation.

The research is centred around the following question:

How to explore interpretation in Historically Informed Performance through a poetic, experimental and “haptic” approach?

Sub-questions:

• Is it possible to have a HIP practice that doesn’t result in an Early Music interpretation?
• How can one critically engage with interpretation to reveal the worldviews that Early Music repertoire inhabits and through this illuminate contexts of today?

With these questions on interpretation in the context of HIP, Bell hopes to lay bare the technologies (in the Foucauldian sense) of the present and the past, illuminating each through contact with the other. To investigate these questions, Bell proposes a project where he looks at British vocal music from the 17th century in three lab experiments:

Lab experiment 1 - Recording Nostalgia

With baroque guitar, bass viol and four-track tape machine as sonic palette, Sean Bell will explore lute songs. Connecting HIP as a method to record history and tape machines as a retro recording device, what will the interplay between these nostalgic technologies be?

Lab experiment 2 - MASK

Exploring the allegorical performance genre Masque through a modern performance art lens. Genealogies like gesture, masking the face, ambivalence of character, are reassembled with abstract language from performance art. What are the worldviews contained within each performative language?

Lab experiment 3 - Baroque Band

Using music from the declamatory style (style within English 17th-century music), Bell will explore how band tradition as a collective creative process rooted in pop and jazz, can work with a HIP ensemble. Can the result be a theatrical baroque gig?

Sean Bell says: "I hope the reflections around this project could heighten dialogue and criticality towards why we engage with HIP and how this informs our ideas and world views. I believe this project also infiltrates the realm of social ideas and conventions. I am interested in how musical material encodes and creates systems of belief across history. In this project I would not only set different tools, ideas and aesthetics against themselves but in so doing also reveal the worldviews they inhabit or that inhabit them."

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Sean Bell is enrolled in the PhD programme in Artistic Research from 1 September 2025.