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Frances-Marie Uitti

Musical performance on cello of Ygghur (Giacinto Scelsi) and Intersection 4 & Projection 1 (Morton Feldman)

2016 Season


Cellist, Frances-Marie Uitti performed for the opening of Agnieszka Kurant’s exhibition, Variables.

Francis-Marie Uitti (b. 1946, Chicago) has collaborated with radicals Dick Raaijmakers, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi and worked closely with Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough and numerous composers from the new generation.

UItti tours extensively around the world as a soloist, from New York City to Mongolia and appears regularly in festivals such as the Biennale Di Venezia, Strasbourg Festival, Gulbenkian Festival Ars Musica, Holland Festival and for radios and television in Europe, Japan, and the United States. Her compositons can be heard on ECM records, Cryptogrammophone, JdKrecords, Seraphin, Etcetera, and BVHaast.

The University of California Press 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 is now in the finishing stages. Her treatise, New Frontiers, was also published in Cambridge Companion to the Cello, Cambridge University Press and for Muzik Texte, Koln, and Arcana, the collected writings of composers edited by John Zorn.
She co-invented a Stringless Cello at CNMAT (UC Berkeley) with Adrian Freed and is now finishing an updated version at FabLab with Lex van den Broek and Johan van Kreij. At present she is redesigning the upper and lower bows used in her TwoBow technique under tutelage of Andreas Grutter, master bow maker.

Frances-Marie Uitti has lectured master classes at practically all major European conservatories (Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen, Royal Conservatorium Den Haag, Sweelinck Conservatory Amsterdam, Royal Conservatory Brussels, Santa Cecilia Roma, Hochschule fur Musik in Koln, Hochschule Basle, etc.) and many music schools in the US. In 1997 she was named a Regents Professor at the University of California San Diego and again in 2007 at UC Berkeley. In 1998 she shared teaching with Anner Bijlsma and Ralph Kirschbaum at the International Cello Festival in Aarhus. In 1999 she was invited to Mills College to give lectures and masterclasses as well as teach contemporary techniques. For many summers, she has taught at the Dartington International Chamber music Festival as well as being professor of cello at Darmstadt International Summer Festival. In 2002-2003 she was invited as Guest Professor at Oberlin Conservatory teaching classical cello repertory and chamber music. Uitti has also given masterclasses at the Juilliard School of Music, Yale University, and Northwestern University in 2003. She was invited for a Fromm Foundation residency at Harvard University in 2003/04.
She is often invited to sit on the juries for the International Symposium of Composers Meeting (ISCM Festival), Gaudeamus Competition for Composers, Gaudeamus Performers Competition, ICMC London.

She frequently travels to Bhutan and is founder of the Bhutan Music Foundation, a charitable non-profit promoting the music in Bhutan, the musical education of Bhutanese, and the preservation of Bhutanese indigenous music.

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