A Performer’s Approach: thinking radically about instrumental sound A workshop with Frances-Marie Uitti

Workshop
This event has now finished.
  • Date and time: Monday 26 February 2024, 4pm to 5.30pm
  • Location: In-person only
    058, Sally Baldwin Buildings, Campus West, University of York (Map)
  • Audience: Open to all
  • Admission: Free admission, booking not required

Event details

A tour through some of the seminal thinking during a period of radical development in the sonoral resources of string instruments including examples from composers I've worked with closely: Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, John Cage, Horatio Radulescu, Brian Ferneyhough, Richard Barrett, Louis Andriessen, James Tenney etc. New concepts, notations, resonators and electronics included. 

About the speaker

Frances-Marie Uitti

Composer/performer, Frances-Marie Uitti, 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 vs articulated playing. György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Giacinto Scelsi, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, Horatio Radulescu, Lisa Bielawa are among many who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her. 

"...arguably the world's most influentially experimental cellist" – Tom Service, The Guardian.