Creativity at the Edge: Health, Music and Community

Harvard FAS

In 2013 at the Nancy Hanks Lecture for Americans for the Arts, cellist Yo-Yo Ma postulated that the scientific concept of “edge effect” could be applied to artistic and cultural development. In ecology, the “edge effect” describes the intense bioactivity that occurs where two divergent ecosystems meet. Ma contends that the ecological edge effect is an example of Nature’s creativity, explaining that “in that transition zone, because of the influence the two ecological communities have on…