{"id":22376,"date":"2013-08-09T10:33:15","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T16:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=22376"},"modified":"2025-10-24T06:58:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T13:58:19","slug":"charlotte-bell-artist-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/charlotte-bell-artist-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlotte Bell: Artist Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"charlottebell_blog\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Charlotte Bell\u2019s striking silver hair hangs to the middle of her back, her voice is quiet, and she walks with anticipation: pointing to the towering trees, florets of allium, and the neighborhood\u2019s 100-year-old roses.
\nWalking with her feels oddly like stepping out of Salt Lake\u2014the noise and rush\u2014into reflective space.<\/p>\n

Bell, author of\u00a0Mindful Yoga, Mindful Life: A Guide for Everyday Practice,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Yoga for Meditators: Poses to Support Your Sitting Practice,\u00a0<\/em>teaches yoga and plays the oboe and English horn for Red Rock Rondo and the Salt Lake Symphony.<\/p>\n

Drenched as she is in meditative practice and art, it\u2019s no wonder she comes off as rooted.<\/p>\n

When we step from the porch into her house, the cats converge: friendly Pushkin, hissing Lily, and sweet Jazzy, a thin, gray animal she rescued 19 years ago from a feral litter born in her backyard. When Jazzy\u2019s littermates were poisoned in the alley, Bell started feeding his cautious mother from her porch.<\/p>\n

They kept this arrangement for twenty years, the cat running to greet Bell on the sidewalk after yoga, while keeping a safe distance, and waiting to venture onto the porch until Bell left.<\/p>\n

Then a surprise. In 2011, the animal walked right into the house. \u201cShe couldn\u2019t hear. She was really old and fragile. It was so amazing, like day and night, overnight. She suddenly was an indoor cat. She\u2019d sit on my lap.\u201d<\/p>\n

The feral mother used the litter box, acted like \u201ca perfect house guest,\u201d and stayed the two months it took her to die.<\/p>\n

I asked her how she felt about putting old animals to sleep.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want them to suffer, but I sometimes wonder if people don\u2019t want to be with their suffering either. It\u2019s hard to be with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

What kind of woman becomes a musician, writer, yogi, and haven to homeless creatures?<\/p>\n

***
\nWe sit at her grandmother\u2019s table; it still has the original finish, and Pushkin winds around our tea and coffee cups. My chair is tied with hundreds of colored nylon strings Bell uses to make reeds for her instruments, something she describes lightly as a \u201cpain in the ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

While ambitious musicians buy cane raw in the tube, Bell buys hers gouged and shaped and folded. After soaking, she cuts the bamboo for 45-60 minutes using a double hollow ground knife. The reed may only last four hours of play.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had reeds that have lasted a lot longer and a lot less. What I hate is when I spend an hour carving one, and it still sounds like crap, and I can\u2019t use it. There are periods we go through, called\u00a0reed hell,<\/em>\u00a0where every reed you make is awful. You\u2019ll get a really bad batch of cane, and you\u2019ll have to learn to play on a poor reed. Every oboe and English horn player struggles with it, but it\u2019s part of the territory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bell used to cheat: buy her reeds from her old teacher or Bob Stephenson, the principal oboist of the Utah Symphony, who is known to whip them out in ten minutes like a champ.<\/p>\n

When the cane is good, playing is easy, a joy. \u201cYou can express yourself. You feel like you have some control over the dynamics and the phrasing. It\u2019s so fun. But when you\u2019re struggling against your reed, if your reed is resistant in some way, it\u2019s just not fun.\u201d She grins. \u201cAnd I\u2019m doing it for fun, for the most part.\u201d<\/p>\n

The horn is often soloed, matched to cellos and violas, or paired with lower voices, like the French horn or bassoon. It reminds Bell of a human speaking: thoughtful and meditative. The oboe, on the other hand, tends to cut through everything and pair with the violins and flutes.
\nOboe and English horn: they are her yin and yang in the orchestra\u2019s swell.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In college, Bell slowed her involvement with music and stopped writing. She convinced herself she was incapable; papers felt like suffering.
\nIt took years before she found a way back into creativity. The spark reignited with yoga but didn\u2019t take hold until she signed up for a silent meditation retreat in 1988.<\/p>\n

Pujari and Abhilasha Keays led five days at the Last Resort Retreat Center in Cedar Breaks, Utah.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was hellish beyond anything I had experienced in my life up to that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spent days cursing her teachers, her body, and fantasizing about escape routes. Then one night after readying for bed, Bell reached for a doorknob, and \u201cthe experience was absolutely exquisite. After opening thousands of doors in my life, this was the first time I had felt what it is to turn a doorknob.\u201d It was the subtle sensation, she says, the extending joints and muscles, the chill of the knob.<\/p>\n

The next day she \u201cfelt a sense of joy so intense and absolute that I thought (quite mistakenly) that I must be enlightened. Colors were more vibrant, my eyesight more crystalline. I became absorbed in sounds that would have been irritating the previous day. Later that afternoon my mind settled into a pervading peace like none I had ever experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n

By evening, the irritation was back, but a \u201cdesire to embody mindfulness had been awakened,\u201d and when she returned home, writing became easy, started to flow through her.<\/p>\n

She credits meditation entirely. It helped her slow habits of mind that weren\u2019t creative and open space for new activities.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou drop below the level of the mind that just wants to go through the same thoughts over and over again. You drop into a vast space, and there\u2019s always more; there\u2019s always deeper layers, and I think that it gets more subtle over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can really focus on what you\u2019re doing, have the experience where you get so focused you start losing track of time, things just start to come through you that you didn\u2019t know you had access to.\u201c<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I ask her if it\u2019s another form of meditation to practice her instruments.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a meditation for me to\u00a0play<\/em>\u00a0in a group. To\u00a0practice,<\/em>\u201d she stalls, \u201cit depends. I think playing piano as a kid was the first meditation I ever did. The absorption that happened as I was playing was quite similar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the oboe and English horn it happens more in a group because I\u2019m in the midst of a complete piece of music. On the piano, it\u2019s pretty complete on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discomfort has been her answer: embracing hours of reed-making, sitting like a stone while her body protests, practicing for the moments she plays with the Red Rock Rondo, and providing companionship to animals leaving this world. The practice has led her to creativity and space.<\/p>\n

The payoff is texture.<\/p>\n

Pushkin is back on the table, again. He bites Bell; she says he\u2019s hungry.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Red Rock Rondo will\u00a0perform\u00a0August 22, 7:30pm at the Gallivan Center through the Excellence in the Community concert series. Admission is free. Bell\u2019s Emmy Award-winning chamber folk ensemble, Red Rock Rondo, has five other well-known acoustic musicians: Phillip Bimstein, Kate MacLeod, Hal Cannon, Flavia Cervino-Wood and Harold Carr. They have two cds: Zion Canyon Song Cycle and Secret Gift. A video of \u201cHay-Colored Leaves<\/a>\u201d is available on\u00a0YouTube.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Mindful Yoga, Mindful Life: A Guide for Everyday Practice, and Yoga for Meditators: Poses to Support Your Sitting Practice are available at Sam Weller\u2019s Bookstore and Golden Braid Books.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Charlotte Bell\u2019s striking silver hair hangs to the middle of her back, her voice is quiet, and she walks with anticipation: pointing to the towering trees, florets of allium, and the neighborhood\u2019s 100-year-old roses. Walking with her feels oddly like stepping out of Salt Lake\u2014the noise and rush\u2014into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":848,"featured_media":22377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[1606,1607],"class_list":["post-22376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-charlotte-bell","tag-red-rock-rondo"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/charlottebell_blog.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-29 16:43:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22376"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97326,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22376\/revisions\/97326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}