Besides his opera Holy Ghosts, Bell has written many other works for vocal ensemble, solo voice, and vocal chamber music. An early piece for vocal ensemble is his SSATB quintet Domination of Black from 1971, a student work on a text by Wallace Stevens.Boston Area Music Libraries staff, ed. Linda Solow, "Larry Thomas Bell", in The Boston Composers Project: A Bibliography of Contemporary Music, pp. 31-33. 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. A usual pairing of voice and instrument solos is found in his double concerto, The Idea of Order at Key West, op. 13 (1979–81) a work for soprano and violin soloists, large string orchestra, and percussion battery, also based on a poem by Wallace Stevens. More recently, he has composed sets of songs on texts by Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Campion. His most ambitious work for voices is The Seasons op. 101, a cantata consisting of four cycles of songs with texts by Elizabeth Kirschner. 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. The entire work is summed up in the Finale: Echolocations of Cellos, a single-movement work for all eight performers.
