Use of verb ます-stem when て-form seems possible


I saw this line in a song:

> 時計塔の頂上椅子に座り微笑んでるあなたは

I'm curious why it uses 座 **り** rather than 座 **って**?

Since it's a sequence of actions I would've thought that 座って would be more
applicable, but since 座り actually happens to have an entry in the dictionary,
maybe this is just an exception? This is also from a song set in a medieval-
esque era, so maybe it was used to sound more literary? Curious to see if
there's a definitive answer.




Like the ~て form, the ~ます stem can be used to express "verb, and..."  
The ~ます stem can have the nuance of being more formal and/or factual, but for
the most part they are interchangeable. Most likely the nuance arises from the
~ます stem being more popular in writing for being more compact.

I've read before that ~て form requires its phrases to be in sequence through
time and ~ます stem doesn't, but the following links reject that. Instead they
say that ~てから can be used to emphasise the order.

[Here's a similar question and
answer.](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/23789/%E3%81%A6-versus-
combining-form-for-joining-clauses)  
[Here's the scholarly article that is in the answer from the first
link.](http://hasegawa.berkeley.edu/Papers/TE.pdf)

