SEAN BELL
Countertenor and Performance Artist
An exploration of 17th century British vocal music through a poetic, experimental and ‘haptic’ approach to Historically Informed Performance (HIP).
As a countertenor, I perform my 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 my artistic practice. I see my 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. I work broadly and exploratively with all these composite elements in order to embody the interpretation.
The research is centred around the following question:
How can I explore interpretation in Historically Informed Performance through a poetic, experimental and “haptic” approach?
With the attached sub-questions:
- Is it possible to have a HIP practice that doesn’t result in an Early Music interpretation?
- How can I critically engage with interpretation to reveal the world views that Early Music repertoire inhabit and through this illuminate contexts of today?
With these questions on interpretation in the context of HIP, I hope 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, I propose a project where I look 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?
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 encode and create systems of belief across history. In this project I would not only set different tools, ideas and aesthetics against themselves but insodoing also reveal the worldviews they inhabit or that inhabit them.
This project forms the basis of my PhD in artistic research at the Norwegian Academy of Music.
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Photo by Manuel Madsen