Born in
Chicago,
Illinois to
Finnish-American parents, Uitti graduated from Berkeley High School in 1964, where she played cello in the school orchestra. She studied
classical music at
Meadowmount with
Ronald Leonard and
Josef Gingold,
Boston University with
Leslie Parnas and
University of Texas with George Neikrug. In Europe she worked at the
Accademia Musicale Chigiana with
André Navarra, winning their top award two years in a row. Uitti invented a radically extended technique using two
bows simultaneously in one hand, becoming the first to transform the
cello into a four-part chordal instrument. This technique expands the
harmonic and
timbral possibilities of the instrument in extraordinary ways: for example, one can play simultaneously 4, 3, 2, and 1 string, with contrasting polyrhythmic articulations between the two bows. Non-adjacent strings can also be accessed. One bow can be played near the bridge while the other is near the fingerboard. She has used over 75 different
tunings in her compositions using this technique, each producing new harmonic possibilities and exotic timbres plus a polyphony and independence of voices that her previous work with a single curved bow couldn't obtain. Early on, she combined singing with the cello and premiered
Louis Andriessen's
La Voce which is dedicated to her. Other works featuring her voice include
James Tenney's concerto, ''Ain't I a Woman?'' with text by Sojourner Truth, David Dramm's
Crosshair,
Rodney Sharman's
The Ecstasy of St. Teresa,
Vinko Globokar's
Janus, and William Kirkpatrick's
Stations of the Cross. Uitti has collaborated with and is the dedicatee of composers
Luigi Nono,
Louis Andriessen,
James Tenney,
Jonathan Harvey,
John Cage,
Karen Tanaka,
Per Nørgård,
Giacinto Scelsi,
Elliott Sharp,
György Kurtág,
Richard Barrett,
Guus Janssen,
Jay Alan Yim,
Vinko Globokar,
Clarence Barlow, David Dramm,
Geoffrey King,
Martijn Padding,
Horațiu Rădulescu,
Calliope Tsoupaki, and Peter Nelson, among many others. She collaborates in duo with
Mark Dresser, and with
Evan Parker, Joel Ryan,
Misha Mengelberg,
David Wessel, and with DJ Low, Scanner, and Stansfield/Hooykaas,
Marina Abramović,
Steina Vasulka,
Frank Scheffer. While living in Rome, she worked closely with
Giacinto Scelsi, not only as dedicatee of all the cello works, but also transcribing from his archive and improvising together from 1975 until his death in 1988. Uitti premiered his newly discovered cello concerto at the Angelica Festival,
Teatro Comunale di Bologna in 2006. She was guest professor at
Oberlin Conservatory of Music for two years, and was awarded the Regents' Lectureship both at the University of California Berkeley and at University of California San Diego. She gives master classes worldwide for composers and string players at conservatories and universities including Yale, Princeton, Stanford, University of Illinois, as well as having the Fromm Foundation Fellowship to teach a residency at Harvard University. In 2003, Uitti commissioned a custom-designed electric 6-string cello from Seattle luthier Eric Jensen, which she later enhanced ergonomically with sensors at Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (
CNMAT) (University of California, Berkeley) working with David Wessel and Adrian Freed and Michael Zbyszynski. She was to have returned to CNMAT in 2008 to design and construct a 12-stringless meta cello with Adrian Freed. She acquired an aluminum cello made in 1929 by the Pfretzner luthier family. She has recorded and performed on the Mongolian Morin Choor, a custom built Uzbeki Sato, and an original Stroh one-stringed cello. As inventor Uitti has developed a difference-tone resonator that strongly amplifies the beating and subtle "ghost tone" produced by chordal playing. She has redesigned and built 5 prototype-bows under guidance of bowmaker Andreas Grutter to facilitate her work with two bows in one hand. At the request of Scelsi, she redesigned the metallic mutes used in the String Quartet #2 and Triphon for solo cello. Uitti was Fellow at Civitella Ranieri in 2021 and produced 200 ceramic resonators and distortion enhancers at Cotto Etrusco for her work Stornelli Storti (working title). She founded the Bhutan Music Foundation which supports traditional music from
Bhutan, music education inside of Bhutan, and various outreach programs. The BMF awards 22 scholarships every year to children who otherwise couldn't afford to study music. Recently the Prins Claus Foundation awarded a grant to further outreach programs in the local schools in Thimphu. Uitti has recorded on
ECM Records,
Wergo,
Hathut Records,
CRI, and BvHaast, JdKproductions,
Cryptogramophone Records, Sargasso, and
Naxos. ==Films, DVDs==