Frances-Marie Uitti (born 1946), composer/performer, pioneered a revolutionary dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. Using two bows in one hand, this invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato/articulated playing, that her previous work with a curved bow couldn't attain.
György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Louis Andriessen, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Sylvano Bussoti are among those who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her. Collaborating significantly over years with radicals, Dick Raaijmakers, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi, she has also worked closely with Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough, pianist Rolf Hind, classical pianist Alwin Bar, filmmakers Frank Scheffer and Frans Zwaartjes, avantgarde guitarist Elliott Sharp, accordionist Pauline Oliveros, DJ Scanner, DJ Low, Stephen Vitiello, video master Ferenc van Damme, Irvine Arditti, Stefano Scodanibbio, Sasha Gavrilov, and members of the Ensemble Modern.
Frances -Marie Uitti tours as solist extensively throughout the world having played for audiences from New York City to Mongolia and appears regularly in such festivals as the Biennale Di Venezia, Strasbourg Festival, Gulbenkian Festival Ars Musica, Holland Festival and for radios and televisions in Europe, Japan, and the United States.
The University of California Press has commissioned a 60,000 word book from her on Contemporary Cello Techniques. A massive treatise on the state of the art of cello and performance techniques from the Kodaly Sonata until the present.Her treatise New Frontiers, was also published in the Cambridge Companion to the Cello, Cambridge University Press and for Muzik Texte, Koln, and Arcana, the collected writings of composers edited by John Zorn.