Sui Generis

Sui Generis was written during the Winter of 2014 for Kobe Van Cauwenberghe for his album with Carrier Records, Give my regards to 116th street.

The title, Sui Generis, is Latin for “of its own kind.” This composition follows from a 2008 solo guitar piece entitled In Terra Nullius (empty land), that attempts to depict remote areas of Northern British Columbia in musical terms. Instead of depicting imagery, Sui Generis concerns itself with the nature of the steel-string guitar and music/sound itself. As a legal principle, Terra Nullius was invoked by colonizing forces to claim land inhabited by aboriginal populations. Colonizing forces claimed that there was no law among these groups and therefore the land could be considered uninhabited, Terra Nullius. Some groups, such as the Inuits of Alaska, responded by invoking Sui Generis: we have different laws, laws of our own kind.

To perform this work, the guitar must be drastically retuned. Each string is tuned down in pitch, resulting in a generally mellow tone, closer to that of a baritone guitar. The intervals between the strings has also been altered to create a microtonal chord of naturally tuned intervals relating to a B-flat tonic, further altering the resonance of the instrument. The upper three strings form a B-flat major triad, while the lower three strings are tuned to more complex intervals: the just minor third, the just seventh, and the just tritone. The electronic sound pushes the harmonic possibilities of the piece further, blending microtonal guitar samples with the live guitar as seamlessly as possible.