[1] She studied under composers Peter Mennin and Vittorio Giannini at Juilliard, and later with Paul Alan Levi.
Bell was also strongly involved with the International Alliance of Women in Music.
[1] Bell married astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1952 and, with him, had three sons, though they divorced in 1976.
In 1983 she married Robert E. Friou, with whom she would go on to found New York Women Composers, Inc. in the following year.
Max Lifchitz (who commissioned it) has played it numerous times, and recorded it on the Vienna Modern Masters label.