[1] A Guggenheim Fellowship (1981), Rome Prize (1982–3), and a Rockefeller grant (1985) took him to Italy,[1] to study, write music, and take piano lessons with Joseph Rollino.

[1] Students have praised him "for his superlative teaching abilities, his talent for making complex issues understandable, his thoughtful approaches for gaining mastery of difficult skills, his wide-ranging musical knowledge, his musicianship, his patience, and his constant encouragement.".

[3] His composition students include Cynthia Wong, Forrest Eimold, George Li, Laura Schwindinger, Russ Grazier, Daniel Kharatian, Aaron Robinson and Martin Matalon.

He is frequently heard on Boston's WGBH (FM) radio, where he played on their first live broadcast on the World Wide Web of his trio Mahler in Blue Light.

[2] Influenced by Beethoven, Carter, and solfège pedagogue Renée Longy, his modernist early compositions (from the 1970s and 1980s) emphasized thematic development, polyphony, and elaborate polyrhythmic structures.

His music has been performed by the Seattle Symphony and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and under conductors Gerard Schwarz, Jorge Mester, and Benjamin Zander; by the Juilliard and Borromeo String Quartets, and Speculum Musicae; cellists Eric Bartlett and Andrés Díaz; pianists Sara David Buechner and Jonathan Bass; and singers Robert Honeysucker, Matthew DiBattista, Thomas Gregg, and D’Anna Fortunato.

Scored for a rock band, incorporating nine hymn tunes, and based on Romulus Linney's play, it combined Bell's Pentecostal Holiness background with his keyboard, vocal writing, and conducting skills.

[7] His first solo vocal work, an extended piece for soprano and piano, is Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination (1976), another setting of a text by Wallace Stevens.

[7] A usual pairing of voice and instrument solos is found in his double concerto, The Idea of Order at Key West, op.

The work begins with Fall: Autumnal Raptures, for tenor and harp; followed by Winter: Exaltations of Snowy Stars, for mezzo-soprano and piano; then Spring: In the Pendulum of My Body, for baritone and harpsichord; and finally Summer: The Vanishing Dew, for soprano and guitar.