Not only a professor in Aquatic Ecology at Wageningen University, Scheffer is also a multi-talented musician and held a concert with his band Scheffer, Bont & De Gans on the second day of the conference.

An extension of science
Playing a music where world, folk, classical music, jazz, new age and ethnic music is blended together, Scheffer and his group added a new dimension to the concept of resilience.

Scheffer considers music to be a strange art. Unlike novels, poems, sculptures and paintings, music rarely depicts the world, he says.

- With the exception of some pieces imitating bird songs or other sounds, instrumental music has always been abstract. Yet, somehow, music captures life. It grips our emotions in a way that science or rationality never can, Scheffer says.

Bypassing the 'real world'
Schaffer comes from a classical background and has participated in numerous projects and performances worldwide, including the USA, England, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Danmark.

He sees music as a way of going beyond the conventional surfaces of the world.

- All good creative art, like good conversation, carries emotional information between the lines. But in art which depicts the world, we can at times be distracted by the surfaces and miss the deep core of feeling where real relationships lies. Perhaps music is a quicker route to feeling and to intimacy precisely because it is abstract. The 'real world' of surfaces is bypassed - the true core is revealed, he says.