Frances-Marie Uitti is a world-renowned American cellist, known for her innovative approach to the instrument. She has revolutionized cello technique, developing the simultaneous use of two bows, which allows her to play complex chords and explore new timbral possibilities. Active above all in contemporary music, she has collaborated with composers such as Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Luigi Nono, György Kurtág and Giacinto Scelsi. Besides performing, Uitti is also a composer, exploring improvisation and experimental music. She has also created sound installations and collaborated with visual artists.
Among the music she performs, the greatest composers of the twentieth century stand out, many of whom have dedicated one or more works to her. Nono, Harvey, Kurtág, Andriessen and Nørgård have written and dedicated compositions to Uitti. She developed an intense artistic relationship with the Roman composer Giacinto Scelsi, who in his last years of activity wrote for her and dedicated to her his entire output for cello.
As she is currently writing a book of memoirs about her relationship with Scelsi, the conversation focused on her experience as a musician and her relationship with her instrument.
Photo: Roberto Masotti
MM: Over the years, you have had the opportunity to interact and collaborate with some of the most important and influential musicians of the twentieth century. What do you think you have gained from your relationship with them and with their music? And how has your approach to the score changed over the years?
The main difference between the music I studied with various composers and that which I subsequently performed concerns the question of language. Each composer had their own grammar, syntax and stylistic characteristics that gave a very unique character to the work in question. The rarefied silences in Nono's Diario Polacco, the use of my two-bow technique, which he used for our work at the Heinrich Strobel Stiftung in Freiburg in preparation for the composition, and the use of multiple cellos with multiple tunings, which had characterized my compositions in the years before I met him. György Kurtág, on the other hand, asked for some of my improvisations and then wrote his perfect jewel, Message to Frances-Marie. The personal style of Louis Andriessen is reflected in his "minimalist" work based on a text by Cesare Pavese, La Voce, in which the strings are retuned and the use of gesture and of the voice in Italian is modeled on my possibilities, resulting in an extraordinary work with the same title. These are just a few examples among many that have used the two bows, the voice both spoken and sung, and also theatrical elements. Once again, each piece is a cosmos of its own, with colors and structures unique to each composer.
CF: I have noticed that, for some decades now, there has been an attempt to expand the possibilities of instruments toward the production of a continuous and multiple sound. Your extraordinary "two bows" technique goes in this direction. There are probably few other examples of these new instrumental directions, such as John McCowen's research on the contrabass clarinet and Mario Bertoncini's "expanded piano." But the main difference between your practice and Bertoncini's research is the use of electronic equipment, mainly to amplify very subtle sounds. Does your use of the acoustic cello derive from a sort of dogma or is it the result of a natural choice?
I have always improvised since I was a child. Don't all children? And later, living in Rome, I reserved time to do it during rehearsals. I increasingly felt the lack of an explicit sense of harmony, not of the suggested chords implied by the crossings of strings and voices in Bach's Suites, but the possibility of playing 4-voice harmony. I commissioned a very arched bow with soft, flexible hair so that I could strike all four strings at the same time, but after a few months I discovered the limits of this approach. (To play the outer strings on the curved bridge, one has to apply more pressure to the two middle strings, thus emphasizing the middle voices over those of the high or low register, whether or not that was musically desirable. In most cases it was a disadvantage for the music I wanted to create, very limiting).
I wanted to be able to access non-adjacent strings, for example, or to give greater voice to one string over the other.
This required two bows. So I invented a way to hold one above and the other below, so as to have total independence in voices, articulations, colors, and so on.
So, to answer your question, it was an organic search born from a musical need.
CF: Do you think there are still new sounds to be discovered in traditional instruments?
Actually I don't think in this way. The sounds that interest me are the result of a clear musical need for expression, and they arise from this need. The search for new sounds in itself might produce an academic result, separated from actual musical expression.
MM: Regarding the expressive potential of your instrument, what has your relationship with technology been over the years?
I use electronics in my works and I have invented several specific instruments to meet my particular musical needs: a 6-string cello and a cello with sensors that I developed at CNMAT, at the University of California. This cello has no sound of its own, but offers innumerable possibilities for controlling prerecorded sounds, manipulating sound in real time, and the same goes for a real-time video part. Since it has so many possibilities within a response time of 6 milliseconds, I call it "the Beast".
CF: You will be playing at the Centro D'arte in Padua with an aluminum cello from 1929. Can you tell us about this instrument?
I chose to play this concert with my aluminum cello from the 1920s, a unique piece. It is believed to have been made in the workshop of the famous German family of luthiers Pfretzchner. I love the deep basses and the silvery highs of the A string, and I often choose this instrument over my classic 1700s instrument.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →