Composer/performer Frances-Marie Uitti, pioneered a revolutionary dimension for 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 vs articulated playing. György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Annie Gosfield, Lisa Bielawa are among many 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 and countless composers from the new generation.

She tours as soloist 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. She premiered cello concerti dedicated to her by Per Norgaard, Dick Raaijmakers, Jonathan Harvey, James Tenney and Peter Nelson, and gave the first performance of the cello concerto of William Jeths in 2000. She premiered the newly discovered concerto by Giacinto Scelsi in 2008.


She has collaborated with pianist Rolf Hind, been featured in films by Frank Scheffer and Frans Zwartjes, played with Elliott Sharp, Pauline Oliveros, DJ Scanner, DJ Low, and Stephen Vitiello and video masters Noisefold.

Her compositions can be heard on ECM records, Wergo, CRI, Cryptogrammophone, JdKrecords, Seraphin, Etcetera, Miasmah,   and BVHaast. 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.


She co-invented a Stringless Cello at CNMAT (UC Berkeley) with Adrian Freed and is now finishing an updated version. In addition, she has invented resonators that amplify the beats and sub harmonics produced by two intervals played simultaneously. Giacinto Scelsi commissioned her to design and produce a resonator for his own works.

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