gelsey bell

Hailing from northern California, Gelsey Bell is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and scholar. Her most recent album is In Place of Arms (2010), the follow-up to Under A Piano (2005). She likes to write songs and sing. She also likes to think about stuff. She began performing as a singer-songwriter when she was eighteen and released her first studio album, Under A Piano, in 2005, after which Indie Sounds NY named her one of its Top Ten for the year.

She began performing as a singer-songwriter when she was eighteen and released her first studio album, Under A Piano, in 2005, after which Indie Sounds NY named her one of its Top Ten for the year. She performs throughout New York City at such venues as Rockwood Music Hall, Caffe Vivaldi, the Sidewalk Cafe, and Goodbye Blue Monday, and has also performed in Pennsylvania, California, Minnesota, and Michigan. She second studio album, In Place of Arms, will be released in mid-September 2010. She also made two experimental albums, February (2008) and Love is Just a Crack in the Place of You (2009) for the RPM Challenge.

Her songwriting grew out of a history of writing poetry, and studying both voice and piano. She began receiving awards for her poetry as early as the second grade and most recently had a poem published by the Tasmanian literary journal, Famous Reporter, in 2009. She studied piano for ten years before transferring her attentions to studying voice. She has studied opera and classical singing with Lise Carlson, jazz and musical theatre with Fran Carbonaro, and has briefly studied jazz with Rhiannon, and extended technique with Joan La Barbara.

She performs regularly as an experimental vocalist, culling from a wide range of techniques and styles to create her own performance works, to literally voice those of contemporary composers, and to explore improvisation. She created an hour-long, site-specific song cycle called Song Cycle in Time/Space (2005) and a suite of works for voice and boom box called Telephone Songs (2006). She is currently developing a set of songs to be performed in public or private bathrooms called Hearffft: Bathroom Songs. She is a core member of the new music ensemble thingNY, with whom she has premiered over a hundred works. Now in their fourth season, they have performed at such venues as the Stone, the Tank, Judson Memorial Church, ABC No Rio, Nuyorican Poets Caf?, and Secret Project Robot, among others. She has worked with composer Tom Swafford to develop his fifteen-minute solo opera ?This is the Real Me,? which she premiered at the Douglass Street Music Collective in 2009. She has worked as a songwriter and performer with the postmodern dance collective Urisov in both San Francisco and New York, and has performed in countless other musical and theatrical contexts at such venues as the Kitchen, PS 122, and Dixon Place, with such folks as Claude Wampler, Banana Bag & Bodice, and Hoi Polloi.

With an insatiable desire to explore the voice on all levels, she is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at New York University in addition to a performing vocalist. Her scholarly work focuses on the voice, song, twentieth-century music and performance, contemporary philosophy, technology, the quotidian, speech pathology, and social justice. She has the pleasure to work with scholars Allen S. Weiss, Andr? Lepecki, and Barbara Browning and is currently working on a dissertation tentatively titled ?Voice-Acts: Performance, Philosophy, and Relationality in the Vocal Activities of Cage, La Barbara, and Lucier.? In addition, she is the Critical Acts Editor, with T. Nikki Cesare, of TDR/The Drama Review: the journal of performance studies, edited by Richard Schechner.

Gelsey also has a sense of humor and strives to not take herself too seriously. She apologizes for this bio's seeming momentary lapse and thanks you for your interest in her activities.