Frances-Marie Uitti

Frances-Marie Uitti (* 1948 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American cellist and composer who has made a name for herself in the field of new music . She developed the simultaneous game with two bows .

Live and act

Uitti studied classical music at Meadowmount Summer School as well as at Boston University with Leslie Parnas and the University of Texas with George Neikrug .

From 1975 she lived for a long time in Rome, where she improvised with Giacinto Scelsi until 1988 , but also transcribed and interpreted his works; In 2006 she premiered his lost cello concerto. Later she lived in Amsterdam. She also worked with John Cage .

By playing with two bows, Uitti transformed the cello “in a pioneering effort into a polyphonic body of sound that is able to produce long-lasting two, three and four-part chords and thus a highly complex polyphony. With two bows in one hand, her technique allows her to play legato and articulated at the same time , to set contradicting accents and a contrasting four-part dynamic. "

The composers György Kurtág , Luigi Nono , Jonathan Harvey , Ernstalbrecht Stiebler and Richard Barrett took this technique into account and dedicated cello works to it. In other compositions, her voice is also required, for example in Louis Andriessen La Voce (which is also dedicated to her), James Tenney's Ain't I a Woman? or Vinko Globokars Janus . She continued to interpret works by Per Nørgård , Elliott Sharp , Guus Janssen , Jay Alan Yim, Clarence Barlow , Martijn Padding , Horațiu Rădulescu , Calliope Tsoupaki and other modern composers, but also played Ricercari .

At Ars Electronica 1990, she presented her own compositions based on Kepler's Somnium , in which the geometry of his writing is adapted to their composition using recirculated and detuned cellos and electronics. In her solo opera she combines music, texts, video and light. In addition, she improvised in a duo with Mark Dresser (CD release Sonomondo ), but also with Evan Parker , Misha Mengelberg , Pauline Oliveros and David Wessel .

For decades she has performed successfully in the USA, Europe, Canada, Korea and Japan; she was to be seen at many big festivals, again and again at the Holland Festival . She has taught at numerous American and European universities and conservatories. Your article New Frontiers was widely received; it was reprinted in the Cambridge Companion to the Cello as well as in John Zorn's Arcana: Musicians on Music or in MusikTexte .

Filmography, DVDs

• 13AL . DVD with Yota Morimoto.
• Eric van Zuylen Alyssa in concert
• Elliott Carter Frank Scheffer
• Werner Herzog Rescue Dawn (various pieces)
• Stansfield / Hooykaas Solstice
• Stansfield / Hooykaas Re: Vision
• Luchino Visconti / Heiner Goebbels De Val van de Goden

Web links

• Web presence
• Discussion of the CD production Imaginings by Jonathan Harvey and F.-M. Uitti
• Review of the CD There Is Still Time by Frances-Marie Uitti and Paul Griffiths
• Frances-Marie Uitti in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry at http://composers-classical-music.com
2. ↑ Press reactions to the Scelsi record (ECM) ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Portrait (Days of Utopia)
4. ↑ Person 1998 ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Discussion of the CD Sonomondo with Mark Dresser ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.