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Echoes of the Land: A Curatorial Practice Through the Bass Clarinet
Eugene Lai ｜2 July 2025
“Echoes of the Land” was a curatorial journey shaped by sound, memory, and cultural resonance.
Centered on the bass clarinet, the program explored one guiding question:
How do suppressed voices speak when language fails and belonging feels uncertain?
At the heart of this project was a belief:
“sound carries who we are.”
As a Taiwanese musician living and studying in Europe, I often move between cultures. This recital became a way to reconnect land, identity, and self through sound as a vessel for cultural memory.
It also served as the final exam for my Master’s degree at the Prins Claus Conservatorium Groningen.
Translating Culture Through Performance
The program featured works by four contemporary composers from East Asia and Oceania: Isang Yun (Korea/Germany), Yu-Hui Chang (Taiwan/United States), Felicity Wilcox (Australia), Nigel Westlake (Australia).
Their music draws inspiration from folk melodies, personal memories, natural imagery, and cultural reflection. Despite their different styles, each piece asks the same questions:
Who are we? Where do we come from?
As a performer, I saw myself as a cultural carrier as well—embedding lived experience and hybrid identity into every sound.
How Does Sound Carry Memory?
Isang Yun – Monolog
Composed late in Yun’s life, Monolog reflects his deeply multicultural voice, blending Western avant-garde techniques with East Asian aesthetics. Although it’s not directly tied to political cases, the work carries the solitude and introspection of displacement. On the bass clarinet, Monolog becomes a sonic soliloquy—quiet, internal, and resilient.
Yu-Hui Chang – Flying Away White Egret
Based on a Taiwanese folk tune I grew up hearing, this piece brought me back to vivid memories of egrets soaring across the mountains in rural Taiwan. Chang’s imaginative treatment transforms a simple melody into lyrical, exploratory lines filled with both nostalgia and playfulness.
Felicity Wilcox – People of This Place
This work draws on the Gadigal land where Sydney now stands. Using air sounds, overtone textures, and vocalizations, it evokes the First Nations concept of Country—a worldview in which land, people, and identity are inseparable. This piece became a core part of my master’s research and shifted the way I understand listening.
I chose to perform these two land-rooted works back to back, creating a cross-Pacific dialogue between Taiwan and Australia.
Nigel Westlake – Invocations
Invocations carries deep personal emotion. Dedicated to the composer’s father—a clarinetist and his first mentor—the piece blends memory and sonic landscape. Westlake studied bass clarinet and composition in the Netherlands, an experience that profoundly shaped his approach to contemporary sound.
I first heard this work over a decade ago on the Naxos Music Library, and I was immediately captivated by how it sounds. That moment planted the first seed of my desire to study in the Netherlands. Performing it here now feels like the completion of a long-awaited, full-circle journey.
The Bass Clarinet
Even nowadays, the bass clarinet rarely takes center stage. Its sound is inky, flexible, and expressive—capable of whispering, growling, hovering in liminal space.
To me, it represents multiplicity and marginality. It doesn’t dominate, but it grounds. It can be powerful or delicate. For this recital, the bass clarinet was more than an instrument.
It was my voice, and my home.
Final Thoughts: Curation as Performance, Sound as Home
Echoes of the Land was not just a recital.
It was a statement of artistic identity and a search for belonging through sound.
If home is no longer a place, can sound rebuild it?
If language fails, can resonance carry who we are?
I believe it can.
As a performer and emerging researcher, I see curation not only as programming but as a way of placing myself in conversation—with history, with land, and with other voices.
This recital is dedicated to those who live in between.
May we keep listening, remembering, and connecting
through sound that carries us across cultures and across lands.