Frances-Marie Uitti

Frances-Marie Uitti (born 1948) is a cellist and composer know for her use of extended techniques and performance of contemporary classical music. Tom Service, music critic for the Guardian newspaper, recently called her, "arguably the world's most influentially experimental cellist."

Stephen Brookes wrote in the Washington Post, "The spectacularly gifted cellist Frances-Marie Uitti has made a career out of demolishing musical boundaries. She has developed new techniques (most famously, playing with two bows simultaneously), collaborated with a who's who of contemporary composers, and pushed the cello into realms of unexpected beauty and expression...Uitti showed why she might be the most interesting cellist on the planet."

Uitti studied classical music at Meadowmount with Ronald Leonard and Josef Gingold, Boston University with Leslie Parna and University of Texas with George Neikrug. In Europe she worked at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana with André Navarra, winning their top award two years in a row.

Uitti invented a radically extended technique using two bows simultaneously in one hand, becoming the first to transform the cello into a four-part chordal instrument. This technique expands the harmonic and timbral possibilities of the instrument in extraordinary ways: for example, one can play simultaneously 4, 3, 2, and 1 string, with contrasting polyrhythmic articulations between the two bows. Non-adjacent strings can also be accessed. One bow can be played near the bridge while the other is near the fingerboard.

She has used over 75 different tunings in her compositions using this technique, each producing new harmonic possibilities and exotic timbres plus a polyphony and independence of voices that her previous work with a single curved bow couldn't obtain.

...
Wikipedia