Transcript:

TODD L. BURNS

Thank you all for coming here. We have a very, very special situation today. Through happenstance we have not one but two amazing electronic pioneers, legends, etc… with us on the couch, and we thought it would be great to have them talk a little bit about their careers, and also their collaborations over the years. Please help me welcoming Laurie Anderson and Jean-Michel Jarre.

First of all, thank you so much for coming. I guess, why did you guys feel like it was important to be here today, of all days, to come in and talk? I mean, given the circumstances of what’s happened in the city.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yes, much better. Yes, I was just saying that as a French citizen, I should maybe start by saying that I wanted to be here just to actually be together today, because actually, apart from what happened in the past few hours here in this country…I mean, all of you, and partly your organization, put a lot of energy and effort to welcome lots of artists, young producers and people obsessed, I would say, interested, excited by music, and electronic music, technology, and so on, and we are facing the fact that everything has to be cancelled as a consequence of this really tragic event.

I just would like to say that I’m obviously especially moved by the fact that I lost also some people, we lost some people we knew very well. I mean, some sound engineers, and it’s also hitting our community, and not only our community as musicians, but also as everyone on the planet needs music, loves music. This particular terrorist act also hit a generation, your generation, and also hit at the people just there for the love of music. I think it was really appropriate for us just to be together and talking about what it would be like, and about music in the most free way.

I would like to say also something more general about this. It’s actually… we kill people, I mean, they kill us, and this is the kind of blood-for-blood situation, it’s a waste of energy, and it’s a very sad day on just what happened. This kind of situation is just…it’s probably the first time that we are all… our generation is confronted with this kind of war zone in Paris. I was in the studio on Friday night until 5:00 in the morning. I was recording something someplace in Paris, and when I went back home, it was around 4:30 in the morning, and it was like something… we never knew, like, being really in a kind of war zone where – probably you were maybe around during that night – and it was like this whole town being absolutely silent with lots of police cars, but with no noise.

It was silent, and lots of activities like this, with the police and the army, and people going all over the place, and it was very strange, and I think that even in an audio point of view it was frightening. Here we are and, anyway, thank you for the Red Bull Academy to welcome such a great event in Paris, and we hope to see you soon again here in this town.

TODD L. BURNS

Thank you. Laurie, after the September 11th attacks in New York, you did a live album – or you did a live concert, rather. It’s just almost a week afterwards, and it was one of the first kind of major cultural happenings in the city, almost. Can you talk about that experience, and why you felt like at the time also that was such an important thing?

LAURIE ANDERSON

Sure. First of all, I am so happy to see you all here. I’m really glad that circumstances have put us in the same room, because these moments are just so incredible, and when everything breaks you have this incredible opportunity to look at things, and often, life doesn’t give you that break. I hope that we can, this afternoon, talk about that and really want to hear your ideas on it, because I actually, really, I learned a lot 15 years ago when that happened in New York, and… we blew it. We had this opportunity just for a little moment to do certain things very differently. Instead we chose revenge, and we chose to start rattling the sabers, and that was a huge mistake. Where we are today is part of the results of that approach to the world.

I was always afraid of this for so many years. I used to talk about it with other musicians, like, why doesn’t this ever happen in concerts? It’s this kind of secret fear of musicians, like, why are we immune to this? In the United States we have a lot of this all the time. We have it in movie theaters, we never had it in concerts, but we have these guys, and we have guns, and we use them all the time, and there are a lot of really crazy people who come in to movie theaters and they just…and you watch the watersheds being…the marks being crossed, the lines being crossed.

By that I mean, you think, “Oh. That’s just so terrible, we should stop this.” Then we had, last year, we had a gunman…two years ago, into a grade school and he killed all the little children in the school. And you think, “Okay, it’s going to be over now. Gun control; are we finished?” No. In fact, what we did was we said, “Okay, we can tolerate that. We can tolerate that, for the freedom we have of arming ourselves.”

At that point, I thought, this is, we can’t say anything more. If it’s okay, if you come in and kill a lot of little children, and that’s okay with you, then you’ve really crossed a line. It’s really important to me, to think now, of what artists and musicians can do, because this is the first time that this has happened in our own place, in our own place, in a concert hall, in a club. What I hope to do in the next couple hours is hear some of your ideas about you feel about it, if there’s a response that you think you would like to make as a musician, as someone in the world of music.

Do you have a responsibility now, or no? Or do you have none? Do you have no responsibility, or do you have one? This is what I hope to explore, and I think that, in New York I know we tried so hard to make a response to this, but as you know, people just close their doors, and they go “Oh, I’m afraid,” and things keep happening, and so people are afraid. Okay, and it’s dark, our planes didn’t fly, for me the neighborhood was, I live right next to, a few blocks from there, and so for me it was a year of real insanity, of the big hole in the city, and all the tumult, but what struck me the most was the moment when you have a little opportunity to say, like a detective, “Why did this happen? Let’s see why, why did this happen?”

Instead of immediately, “I’m going to get them.” You stop for a second, and you say, “What in the situation created this event?” If you are curious, if you are not, and if you are just, well, wipe it away, many people did that, and I thought that was a huge mistake. Problems are interesting. One of the things I learned in the studio from…Did you ever work with Brian Eno in the studio?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yes.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah? Okay, so you probably … Yeah, so you probably had a similar experience, I bet. This is a really wonderful thing, and whenever we had a problem with a piece of music, or with an approach, or with a piece of technology, Brian would get so happy. He was like, “No problem. Great!” He cheered up immediately, it was amazing, everyone else was like, “How are we going to do this, it’s not working, or it’s a terrible song,” or it’s a whatever, and he was immediately laughing and happy because it’s a chance to change your ideas. To change the way you are trying to do it, because you can’t keep hammering at something, it’s going to fall into pieces, you are going to break it if you keep hammering and it’s not going to work.

You get to get to go, “Oh, why is that not working?” And you get to try to fix it in a whole another way. These are moments that don’t come up so often, where everything breaks, and everyone is going, “Oh.” And this is the moment to open your eyes and go, “Okay, why is this happening? Why is this happening? Then what do we do, if anything?” I’m not saying it’s necessary to do anything. Just necessary, I think, to look at it.

The concert that I did shortly afterwards was also the first time a lot of people came out of their houses in New York after this, and I was singing some songs that I hadn’t done for a while, and people are like, “How did you write those songs for this situation?” The thing is that this particular conflict we are in now, and we were experiencing Friday night, has been going on for three decades, and I was writing about then, and it hasn’t really changed. It’s just gotten different names, and it’s been labeled in different ways, but it is the conflict between East and West, in various guises of Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, and it’s the same thing.

TODD L. BURNS

It’s interesting how songs that you’ve done take on new resonances, 20, 30 years down the road. Jean-Michel, I mean, I wonder if there’s music that you’ve made that you hear in completely different ways than when you’ve made it originally, looking back at your stuff?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

I don’t know. I suppose that’s our job as musicians, is to make the air vibrating. It’s very invisible, and it could be pathetic in a sense, because it’s just invisible, nobody sees this, and the way you are making the air vibrating you can create boredom, or people who want to have sex, or dancing, or moving their bodies until the end of the night, or fully in tears, and sometimes it’s the same music which could also create this.

I would like to come back to what you said, Laurie, about two things. About the notion of accident, that we all know how important it is in our jobs, in our day-to-day work, and something like what happened in this town, I mean two days ago, it’s a major accident, so how can we…how can we use it positively in something interesting; or not, as you were saying?

This is something I really would like you to react on also, to get also your feedback because it’s just a discussion with friends here. We would like, really, to hear also your reactions. The second thing is also, when all this happened, I thought about my mom. My mom was a great figure in the French Resistance, and she told me about the idea that when society is generating things that you can’t accept, somebody has to stand up, and not saying “Stop” necessarily, but saying, “Think about it. Be aware.” The reason why I have, for instance, lots of respect for somebody like Edward Snowden, because in a sense, it’s exactly what he’s doing, and we should think about this kind of attitude towards this.

In the art of war, people are saying that you, I mean, to fight an enemy you must understand him, and I think we never…I mean, as the Western world, never asked this question. We never ask this question to ourselves: “Why these people are doing this?” Beyond the fact that you just said on CNN, you hear every CNN or news channels, you hear, “Okay. They are barbarians. Okay, that need to be shot.”

What does it mean, being a barbarian? You know that the line between a terrorist and a resistant is very fragile, so we should also understand this; we should also try to understand the reason why, and then fighting for the good reason, for the right reasons, and to know exactly what we are fighting for or against.

This is something that, obviously, can be triggered, what I’m saying, and what you are saying, by what we do as musicians. I think music is, when you think that these people are saying that they wanted to hit this club, and to hit people listening to music and doing music because music is not allowed in their systems, these crazy people, that you should try to understand why are they saying this, because it could be even the source of inspiration for songs, and I think we have not…we are very lazy, as the Western world is very cynical, very arrogant and very lazy, and we are not thinking enough about this kind of; “What’s going on, on the other side, in their minds?”

They are human beings like you and us, and we should really think about it, and this is the kind of accident that we can turn like in judo, I mean, taking the weakness of the moment, the weak moments, and transforming it in strong moments. As we do in studios, by actually using accident as an advantage. What if we could use this tragedy to our advantage?

TODD L. BURNS

You make a good point about language, and the way that it’s used, and to different ends. Do you feel like the language has changed? I mean, you’ve said that the names might be different, but is the way that we talk about it changed recently, in the 15 years, do you feel like?

LAURIE ANDERSON

I don’t think so, because you can still sling around the word, you can just say “terrorist” and that will be the end of that person, and to use that phrase. I mean, I notice how many people have gotten that in their vocabulary, thinking of Putin, for example, who was talking about Chechnya, and he suddenly calls them, they are suddenly terrorists, as opposed to his enemies. And as soon as you say that word, then it changes the game. I think language is really important, but what you are saying, too, about understanding motivation, I think it’s very important for artists and musicians to look at the situation and ask what the motivation is, because I think labeling things is awfully easy to do, and we live in a corporate culture in which labeling, and basically profiling is the way we do things, it’s the way we market everything.

It’s the way we market ourselves, it’s the way we define things in very quick terms, and here is a stupid example. You get a book on Amazon, and ping, two seconds later it goes, “Bill, you like that book, you are going to like this book too.” Then you have to say, “Wait a second, do you know that first book I just bought, that was a gift. Don’t think you know me by what I just bought. Don’t put your little frame around me and pretend that you know what I want, and what I’m getting, and what I’m interested in.”

That’s the way we do things in our culture now, so with these very simplistic, very tweetable terms that are just, they don’t have any nuance in them. Suddenly, some gunmen who are…who knows what’s going through these guys minds as they are blowing these people away in the club, what are they thinking? Have they been totally brainwashed? Who are they? Where did they come from? How did somebody say, “You can be one of the brothers, and you’ve been downtrodden by these French people all of this time, but guess what, now you are going to be somebody.” Who is telling them, and how is that language working to convince this person to do something like that?

These are questions that people who use words, and who think about communication, which is you, can be asking. It doesn’t mean that you, of course, have to ask them. We are not sociologists, but I think most people who write are interested in motivations, they are not just interested in plastering a label on somebody and going, “Terrorist.” I don’t know, but the language of defeat, and so on, but I think just starting with trying to understand the motivation, that’s it.

I think a lot of people here, also who are being profiled now as well, don’t particularly have a voice. They don’t have the voice that you do, that you are privileged to have, and there are people…because we all say something and people will listen, but a lot of people who are not in that situation. I think it’s not a bad thing, just to always be…It’s a good thing to do self-expression, but it’s another way to think about the world is, “What about people who cannot speak?” What would they be, what’s going on with that situation? I think you can find your way into that if you try. I think it’s worthwhile doing.

TODD L. BURNS

Obviously a lot of your art, Laurie, especially like Homeland, has been inspired by political events. Jean-Michel, I would say, it’s sometimes a little bit harder to discern because of the instrumental nature of your music, often, where the motivation is, and what some of these motivations are. Do you feel like, though, that’s changed over the years? Your motivations for making music? Or is it always been exactly the same thing that’s been driving you?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Do you know, first of all, I mean, everything is political in a Greek sense of the word, whatever you do, and as a musician you are part of the society, so politics starts by this, a philosophical point of view. I think that music, instrumental music, can be such a political statement, that I discovered recently that my music was not allowed during the Soviet Union in Russia. It was a symbol of, for them, a symbol of evasion or escape, so you never know.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Escape.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Escape, yes, escape, evasion and freedom. So be careful, or don’t be careful. You know, it’s not only the words, but I would like to focus a bit also on activities, and also the reason why I’m also happy to be here today, to be seated beside my friend Laurie, because the first time we met, I’ve been always a huge fan of her work, and actually the way she always and is still continuing doing, questioning the world through art and through different kind of art forms. I think it’s what we are all aiming for, I mean, if I may give an advice it’s to do this, I mean, trying to question with whatever you have. With computer, with the violin, with the vocoder or whatever, and it’s something that is quite unique, and because Laurie did it also not only on the musical point of view, but also on a visual point of view, and obviously this is political.

It’s not because she is using the word again, but you can use just shapes, drawing, and as we know it’s political or not, but we don’t care if it’s political or not. By the end of the day what is important, I will say, that this is the main difference between international and being universal. Being international is like McDonalds or Coca-Cola, or Google trying to sell something that could be swallowed and digested by anyone in the world, and being universal is actually digging in your own garden to find the common roots we all have. This is something totally different. I think that it’s what we have in this room and beyond. I mean we can be not only understood but felt by anyone on the planet, and maybe beyond.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Mich, just to ask you a question. Does this situation make you want to do work with other kinds of people, or do something different, or does it give you motivation to think about your own work a different way, or not really?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

You know, I don’t think so, by the end of the day. I think that concerts should remain. I mean, we should not be afraid. Obviously, we know that, for instance, outdoor concerts are a problem these days. I mean, festivals are going to be a problem in the near future for obviously good reasons, but also the answer to what we are…the answer to all this is, “Shouldn’t we go on like we used to do? Changing our minds toward the enemy is one thing, but changing our day-to-day habits as creator, I think we should not.

LAURIE ANDERSON

I’m just thinking of, does it make you want to expand and like…because you put your work into so many amazingly different cultural contexts, playing in countries that are not on your normal circuit of many artists, so does make you, for example, want to collaborate with artists that you wouldn’t normally be collaborating with, to extend your musical realm a bit?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yeah. I have no preset plan collaborating with Daesh artists, but beyond this, I think that we…as yourself, and probably lots of people in this room, I mean, wanting to experiment. I think that … I don’t know if this answers your question, Laurie, but I think that I’ve always been absolutely against all kinds of boycotts. I think that boycott is something that I don’t understand, deeply. I think that if people suffering about dictator, or somebody hurting the human rights, if on top of this you are saying, “Okay, well, we are just turning my back on this side also a bit.”

If on top of it, you are actually saying, “Okay, these people will not have music, will not have movies, will not have books, on top of it, I think it’s a big mistake.” I think we should all go there, when you have a regime where you think that people are suffering from this regime, you should. It’s what I tried to do in China, or in South Africa, or even here in my own country, when you have the extreme right, I mean, a town or city. I saw some artists saying, “I don’t want to go there.” Do you know, this boycott will end if you start like this, the next week you can also try to stop giving them food, or oil, or whatever. Oil would be, maybe good, because they could use bikes and some other things, but actually, and I think as artists it’s also so apart from all this, also fun to exchange, as you did, Laurie, so many times.

I mean, working with different artists, I mean, this is also the best way to not only educate but to soothe the pain also in those kinds of circumstances. I think that these days we should, in a sense, maybe try to create bridges with some part of the world we are probably frightened by, and partly the Middle East. I remember I did a song, it was in the late ’90s, and I used some samples. I was one of the first ones using samples of Arabic language, and it has been forbidden by some radio stations in France, and that was 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and it’s quite strange. It was actually…it was some samples I used, not religious, I stole that from a radio, from an Arabic radio station, it was just Arabic language like in the news; it was nothing religious or nothing.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Just for the sound.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Just for the sound, and also some people were also, a singer was also singing on it, and I just used the Fairlight in those days, doing some samples from a live recording. I think we as artists, we have also not responsibility, we do whatever we want, but I think we should not stop by anything else than, by ideas and what we are going to do.

LAURIE ANDERSON

I’m interested in you making that kind of distinction between the McDonald’s and the universal. I think that’s a really important one, because I have a feeling that if you try to make music that its goal is to change things or to make things better, it doesn’t work so well. Because it seems to me that you have to think of, like this idea that art and music will make the world a better place. It’s kind of a 19th century idea, that it will make it better, and you have to ask, “Better for who? Better for you and your friends? Or better for who? What are you talking about?” It’s a very tough thing.

When you say, make the music that you want to make and you like, is the most important thing to do. Not try to predict what other people are going to like. How do you even know? Often you don’t even know what you yourself like, so how are you going to do that, and convince other people that that’s going to be good for them? That’s very, it’s very patronizing.

I think the best is to consider yourself, an average enough person, that what you think is good, someone else will, someone else will find the same thing. But to try to convince someone else, ugh. I mean, I had a grandmother who was a missionary, and I mention this because she used music. She was a Southern Baptist lady, and she went to Japan to convert Buddhists to Southern Baptist religion. She didn’t bother to learn Japanese, no, she just sang songs, she sang hymns, and she hoped the Japanese people would get the idea. They did not, didn’t know what she was doing.

She was a very vain person, she was a Southern lady who was really… she had the skill of making these huge, beautiful, beautiful hats filled with grapes and violets and veils, and so her Japanese audiences are like, “We like that. Nice hats.” She was a wonderful gardener. She had beautiful rose gardens in the South, and she saw them cutting bonsai, and she said, “Teach me to cut bonsai roses.” They taught her to cut bonsai and she taught them to make the hats, and that was it; that was enough. It’s awfully hard to convince somebody to really change their deep feelings and their mind at the bottom, and their dreams and their past, and their culture.

You are not going to just sing your way into their heart. You are not, so sing for yourself and hope that other people will go, “I know what he’s talking about, I feel that too.” That’s a way to get inside someone’s head. That’s where you want to go. You want to get right inside someone else’s head, or in their feet or their heart, wherever you want to get, just, you want to get into their body by doing this. You are making worms that go into the ears, earworms that you can’t get out, you can’t get them out, so you want to make those things really, really effective.

The way to make those effective, is make them for yourself, so that you go, “Wow. That is great, that’s great. I like it.” First of all, that will be enough of a reason to make it, and if other people like it, great. If a lot of people like it, great, even better, because I do think that it’s important to think about your audience. Who are you doing this for? I mean, you can sit alone in your room and make beautiful music and nobody ever hears it except you, and two people, or one person, and it could be the greatest music in the world. I wouldn’t know that, it could be. I think it’s part of the effectiveness and beauty of music that it jumps quickly to other people and they get it like right away.

I bet you know that with your best work that people go, “Wow.” They don’t have to think about it, they don’t have to think about, it they just really instantaneous, it goes into the body, it goes into the mind at the same time. Don’t you think?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

I think that it makes all of us very humble because you can work one month on a piece of music and nothing happens…

LAURIE ANDERSON

Exactly.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

… and suddenly one hour something quite interesting happens, and you think that you are nothing, for nothing in all of this, and that makes you quite humble. I mean, talking about technology, and because all this, by the end of the day is related to the technology we use, whatever, it’s electronic technology, acoustic or whatever, and we know that technology is dictating styles, and not the reverse, because the pianoforte has been invented by Chopin, and he did what he did. That was the reason why, because the reason that the 78 was existing that probably, at least, songs were three minutes, and the single became the format in American radio stations. Because of the computer these days that we can have, with hard drives, and a piece of music lasting whatever we want.

Also, going back to what you were talking about in terms of people not able to listen to their own music. I thought that, because we are here in this kind of temple, techno temple, I would say that it’s interesting to think that in the 19th century or 18th century or before, people were doing music with the most abstract interface, with a piece of paper and pencil. Lots of people never heard the music. I mean, people as we know, I mean, in the contemporary of Mozart, they wrote some music, they did some music for all their lives, and because they never found a sponsor, a publisher, and being able to pay for printing the score, or for renting the orchestra, they never heard their music. They kept the music in their mind, that’s all.

They’ve never been able to share their great symphonies, or a piece of shit maybe, that they had in mind, but at least today we can. We have this luxury that we can do our own craft and we can create our own sounds, and we can also share the result instantly. This is a big, big different approach to music. I learned, my first contact related to electroacoustic music, has been with Pierre Schaeffer and the music research center here in Paris, where so many people were thinking about sounds, where we are thinking about music in terms of sounds and not only in terms of notes or solfége, as we know.

He was calling this Musique Concrete, and I always thought it was really good as a name. I was really interested by abstract painting, and was doing lots of paintings, influenced, heavily influenced by Pollock or Soulages, or whatever, and even hesitated at one stage between painting and music, and actually, you’ve been about to keep the two ways, I’ve not. I’ve been maybe too lazy to pursue. Anyway, and we used to call this abstract painting, and I always thought that people like Dubuffet or Pollock or Soulages, people doing peinture concrete, concrete painting, not abstract, because it’s actually… I mean, being directly involved with frequencies and with colors and textures like we are dealing with frequencies, and we are like cooking, cooking frequencies and waves, is what we are doing as musicians. I think we have this luxury these days, this kind of area and what you are organizing, actually allowing lots of people to cook for the future.

TODD L. BURNS

Laurie, you’ve always talked about your work as sculpture with sound, right? Isn’t that the way you talk about the music that you make?

LAURIE ANDERSON

Some of it, yes, but I started as a painter also, and did sculpture, and I still do a lot of paintings, and sculpture also, but it doesn’t seem to me to be very different. I mean, I know that we do have the art police, and they come in whenever you are doing something out of your category. Those of you who are multimedia artists, I think that’s a really meaningless thing to call yourself, but I call myself that, because it’s easy to, and because the art police show up less when you are doing that, because it’s a little more confusing, because if you say, “I’m a musician,” then they are going, “Well, why are you doing that three-dimensional sound sculpture? If you are a musician, get back in the studio.”

Like, “Wait. Didn’t you become an artist so that you could be free? What’s this category stuff” I think it’s not for everybody. I mean, I’m not necessarily thinking that it’s better to be multimedia that single media. I also feel the same way about political art, I don’t think it’s necessarily more virtuous or more interesting to do, art that’s political. Besides, what does it mean anyway? Sometimes if I see a giant, blue painting that teaches me, gives me the feeling of freedom more than a long, tedious essay, or a piece of music about freedom. I was like, “Ooh.” It’s so preachy, because we work with images and sounds.

We get to bypass the brain in certain ways, with these things that we work with, so those are dangerous tools, so they can really be so sharp. Anyway, yeah, 3D sound is…I mean sound installation stuff is very interesting to me, but I don’t really see this so different from…For example, if I’m making a big painting, for me it’s very similar to making a piece of music. In fact, the gesture is even similar to playing the violin, this, and I like to make very big paintings, and I look at them, and I have exactly the same question.

Is it noisy enough? Is it pushing somewhere enough? Is it beautiful enough? Is it crazy enough? Does it have 17 layers, or only four, or does it only have one? All of those things are the exact same question between a painting and a piece of music for me, and also it’s very similar ways of making them.

TODD L. BURNS

Is that what you think? You were nodding as she was talking about that.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yeah. Absolutely; I’m most of the time nodding when Laurie is speaking anyway.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Nodding off.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

No. You mentioned something I’m really interested by at the moment, this 3D, 3D audio. I would like to share some thoughts with you about this, because that was one of my, if we have had this session tomorrow I would have developed this and sharing some things with you more in detail. I think that, as you were saying, Laurie, I think that, by the end of the day, doing music, or sculpture, or even writing words. We both wrote lyrics for songs, it’s the same, it’s exactly the same thing. It’s actually dealing with emotions and shapes by the end of the day, whatever the shape is.

In terms of 3D audio, I think that if you are talking about a bit of the future of music, because it was also previously what we were supposed to do here in these walls… Actually, you know when I started studying electroacoustic music, we were in multi-mono. We were in mono, but multiple mono sources. It was great, and then when I left this for the first time I went into recording studios and it was for me like forgetting my bike, and being in front of a Ferrari, with huge desks, and stereo, and discovering actually the concept of stereo, and very quickly I’ve been quite disappointed and frustrated by stereo all my life.

I think one guy in the ’50s invented – or late ’40s, early ’50s, and we had this very fake trick to create space. I mean, just creating a kind of phase, a phase volume between the left and the right, to give you the sense of, the illusion of space. Which is great, because we all like illusions, we are all dealing with illusions, so if it’s considered as an illusion, it’s okay, but it became the Pravda. I’m not really at ease with this, and I think the 21st century is about to go back to what sound, real sound is. When I’m talking to you, I’m in mono. I mean you are animal, we are animal, we are stereo animals, not only stereo animals, but we are 3D audio, on the audio point of view, animals.

It means that while I’m talking to you I can see Laurie’s hand with a subtle movement. What she has in her hand? The movement you are putting on your chair just there, and not a lot, because it’s gone quite quiet, but you see what I mean. We are all constantly surrounded by sounds and by informations all around our head, and I think that the fact that suddenly we could start thinking in terms of musical composition as nature is giving us the possibility constantly, to hear and experiment with sounds, I think is going to be the next step.

I think we should. As musician, we are the 3D creators, not filmmakers. I mean, we don’t need glasses for 3D, we are able to convey 3D information. Even if we could say that painting could be also 3D because of the wavelength of the colors, and so on and so forth, but you see what I mean. I think that the future is really definitely about exploring the kind of 3D audio, and I would be very interested to have your feedback, maybe later on, on this, because I think that it’s really something I think is going to be developed, and not through this media.

The problem is every technology on 3D these days, I mean, quadrophenia, 5.1., they’ve all been failures, because actually now most of the time you have to be in the middle of the room, and nobody is in the middle of the room, neither in your home, and neither in the concert hall. Having said that, it’s a bit too short, Lots of people are working these days on a different approach, not only for listening to music, but for writing and composing music in terms of this kind of audio environment.

I think that plug-ins are starting to be developed. I mean, IRCAM has done that, but lots of other companies are working on, and I’m working also close to a company developing this kind of idea. The song we did together recently has actually been, I mixed it and we released it in 3D audio, and that’s something I wanted to share with you, maybe if we had more time, but with headphones, and we just forget this for this time. The next time I really would like to share this with you, because actually it’s quite interesting and an impressive thing, and most of it, and more than the gadget, or gimmick, it’s actually a more natural way to listen to sound and to music, and it’s something that I had lots of pleasure to do with her voice, because you are the natural 3D, because when I was mixing …

LAURIE ANDERSON

It really was.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

… all those tracks, we’ve done, I mean instantly it goes…instantly in 3D. You have a kind of 3D way of singing, so I’m very jealous.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Thank you so much. Atmos, did you ever mix for that?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Sorry?

LAURIE ANDERSON

The film, Atmos 7.1.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yeah, I mean-

LAURIE ANDERSON

That’s also really interesting.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yeah. You need special equipment for this.

LAURIE ANDERSON

You do, yeah. Actually I mixed my last film in 5.1 and listened to it in Atmos at a film festival just recently, and it was really startling. It was shelves of sound, and you are right, I think the challenge is to figure out music that doesn’t depend on architecture for your point of view, or point of sound where you are, so you are going to be creating different architecture where you are always the center or you are always off to the side. Where is the sweet spot that you are trying to design? Where is the listener, ideally, going to be?

I just wanted to say another thing about 3D. When I hear 3D sound, I think more like where music is in the world, because one of the things, and I was just thinking, this is so isolated. I mean, here we are in the music world, but it seems awfully small sometimes. Here is an example that I’m thinking of, and I’m bringing up Brian Eno again, but just because I recently saw him, and he did one of his quiet club projects in Brighton, and a surgeon came to this room, and it was a beautiful piece that was probably seven years long.

He sat in there, and he was quite quiet, and the surgeon said, “If only we could have those in hospitals, it would so wonderful.” Because a lot of people really need to focus and listen to something other than electronics beeping; and so in two weeks they had this in a British hospital. Because the walls between music and institutions are thinner there, and I felt, this is fantastic, why don’t more musicians think in those terms of getting out of the so-called music world, and what is music’s function? Where else can it go in cultures?

I also spent a lot of time a couple of years ago, in Cleveland, at a really wonderful place called the Cleveland Clinic, which is a big hospital clinic. They have also a big art collection there, and I thought, they are never going to go for this. I said, “Do you know what; how about Brian Eno sound work at the clinic?” They sent someone over there, and now they have one there, but it was very unusual in the U.S. to do that, because usually those places don’t have a sense of music, this is an unusual place that decides that music and art are part of living and being happy, and having health.

They decided to include it, but I’d just like to encourage you to think a little bit more in those ways, of not necessarily staying in your corner, because your corner can get a little claustrophobic. Think of where else you can go with it, and what else you can do with music.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

What Laurie is saying, there’s not only FM-40 for your music, but also hospitals, which is quite good. It’s absolutely true. I worked in…when I was Schaeffer and we had contacts with Stockhausen, in Köln, in Germany, and I participated in that time in some experiment in hospitals by recreating music close to the sound of the womb of the mother, to treat schizophrenia.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Wow.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

It’s amazing how effective it is.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Fantastic

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

It was a very famous doctor who is the first one who, he used to treat some opera singers such as Caruso and people like this. I remember that we built a kind of glass room, and with some liquid and we were actually reproducing, but with a kind of ambient music, a kind of musical version of the womb, of the mother. I remember this extraordinary moment, where an autistic, autistic-schizophrenic boy, maybe 11 years old. We put his mom in the middle of the room, and she was sitting, and she had never been able to touch her child since he was born.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Okay.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

She was there, and the boy entered in this glass room, and after maybe one minute, he came on the knees of the woman, of his mom, and just like this, and stayed for 50 minutes. It was the first time that they had a physical contact. I just wanted to comment on this, because while you were talking about this, it made me think about the fact that actually, as we know, music can be also approaching so different ways, and it’s very interesting. Also in these areas, we have, the sky is the limit. We have not explored enough of this.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah. I think it’s really wonderful to go to Mars, definitely an interesting place, and it will be the planet that we’ll have to go to. I spent a lot of time on being Artist in Residence at NASA on this topic of Mars, but more than that, and just listening to you, it would be so interesting to really be able to write music that other species could really appreciate.

Imagine writing music for mosquitoes that they would really like, that they would, like, “Get.” I mean, we haven’t really explored so much of our minds, and minds of other species on our planet. I’ll tell you a quick story about a dog concert I did, because I was working on a…I was supposed to give a commencement speech with the Rhode Island School of Design. I was sitting in the green room wearing a mortarboard, the robes, it was really hot, it was so boring. I was like, “Ooh, this…” It’s one of these things that’s just, really late, hours and hours late.

I was super guilty because I had to say to these students, “Hey, don’t worry about your student loan, you’ll wipe that out in a minute. Don’t about worry about getting a job in art world or the music world, it’s so easy.” I was like, “What kind of fraud am I? This is so disgusting?” I was feeling super guilty, and I was sitting next to Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, and he’s also really hot, and really bored, and we are like “Ugh.”

I said, “Sometimes when I’m doing a concert, I look out and I imagine the whole audience is dogs.” He said, “That’s my fantasy too.” I said, “Really?” I said, “Okay. The first person who gets to do that invites the other one.” My concert schedule is a lot simpler than his, so I got an opportunity, actually, I was asked to be the director of a big festival in Sydney. It was a big arts festival, so I got to invite all my favorite painters and directors and writers and sculptors and musicians.

Anyway, I said to the promoter, “Also, I want to do a…I’ll be doing a concert with dogs, for dogs.” He didn’t say, “Concert for dogs?” No. He just writes down “Concert for dogs.” I was like, “Okay.” We did this concert, and it was where the Sydney Opera House, this big plaza and big steps and sails and everything. We thought a few hundred dogs would show up. Thousands of dogs showed up, thousands. We are like “Cool.” We had our little demarcations in the plaza of small, medium and large immediately overflowed, and the veterinarians were all parked around with their vans, and they are ready for big dog fights.

It was a short concert, pretty short, and it started with a…the dog trainer I was working with – because I was planning on doing things up in the registers where dogs hear pretty well – said, “I wouldn’t do that, because you don’t really what’s going to happen.” We took the frequencies down a little bit, but it began for an invocation for whales, because the whales are right there. They are right there in the plaza, and so the beginning was for them, because why do animals sing? To find each other, and the whales to find each other in the ocean, dogs to establish their GPS pattern, “Grr, I’m over here.” “I’m two miles over here, grr.” To map their world.

Where are they in relationship to each other? They are somewhat like us in terms of mapping. I just noticed in the beginning of the show there were a lot of Australian dogs who just want to rock. They want to rock. My favorites were the droolers, they were in different rows, and they were just like, because they didn’t know why they were there, and nobody knew why they were there, really. This is a good situation, when nobody knows why they are there. It’s not a dog run, what am I paying attention to here? Where are the rules? What’s good, what’s bad, what’s not so good, what’s average?

Anyway, at the end, they had all been so polite, until I said, okay, let’s make some noise. Okay, little dogs start off, “Arf-arf-arf,” mediums, “Arf-arf-arf;” okay, big ones, “Arff-arff-arff,” for five minutes. All of these thousands of dogs were just barking just for the hell of it, just because they could, and it was probably the most beautiful sound I ever heard in my whole life. I was like, “This is it.”

For me, this was a big thrill to feel this. I mean, once in a while I get to feel that with an audience, but very rarely with an interspecies audience, so that was really interesting. I thought that could be an interesting direction. I’ve been asked many times since then to do more concerts for dogs, but I was so afraid I would be the artist who does the concerts for dogs.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

A label

LAURIE ANDERSON

A label, yeah, boom. I never did it again, but it’s really an interesting, it was really a lovely, lovely sound, I mean, I really it was so dense and textured and full of joy. It was just pure joy, I thought it was just that.

TODD L. BURNS

I think we should maybe open to questions from the audience. You guys mentioned…

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yes, a pleasure.

TODD L. BURNS

In the meantime while we are waiting for the microphone to be passed around. You’ve obviously done enormous concerts around the world, but never, no dog concerts.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

No. No. I mean, what Laurie was describing is very similar to an average audience. Some people are going-

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Some are barking, I meant it’s-

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

You proved…you made your point that there is much less difference than we could think.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

It’s probably the reason why the dog is our best friend as human being.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah. The effort they make in having empathy is really impressive, and also I like them very much because they study people, and I like to do that too. “Why are you doing that? Who are you?” They do that, and it’s not just because we are their food supply. I mean, something like that. I don’t want to imagine if they were our food supply, how life would change, but they…I think they also like us because we invented cars. This is, like, impressive. They put their out, and swirl-swirl-swirl. Speed, they just like us. That’s why I like them.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Which is also interesting beyond the exciting moment of being on stage in front of dogs, is actually this whole idea to imagine what could be music out of our range, our audio range. You are talking about sounds that could be listened by insects, for instance, and all these kinds of things. I’m working at the moment with some people developing some special speakers. They are dealing with ultrasound, and the ultrasound are just converted in our range, by a special algorithm, and the result of it is actually developing very interesting speakers. It’s still in experiment, but I think it’s going to be quite interesting.

Because of that, they can have, they can convert…because of this quite complex conversion, I could not explain the scientific point of view or technical point of view. I mean, they can have speakers very directional, so the idea of it is actually like…because we are dealing with an ultrasound process. You can have speakers, for instance, around this laptop, and I would listen to the sound, but you being seated here would not hear anything, so it’s quite interesting, and I think that it’s quite interesting to explore also sounds in different ways. Like, I worked a few years ago with astrophysician. He spent lots of time to record the sounds of the planet.

He gave that to me, and we are still working on this project, to make music with the sound of the planet, and what is the sound of the planet, is actually to convert the vibrations of and the energy of every planet into a sound that we can hear, which is very interesting. As a first comment, the sound of the sun is very male, and the sound of moon is very female.

It’s a very soft sine wave for the moon, and a strong square wave for the sun. It’s quite interesting. Then these guys exploring and transmitting beyond the solar system, and this is just what made me thinking about what you were saying earlier about the idea of it, it’s interesting also to approach the exploration of music and sound, with the concept that we are not able to…which is out of our range, and to try to convert it, is what we are saying. The whales, it’s in our range, but it’s so magical because it’s coming from something totally outside from our own species, and it’s very interesting, yeah.

LAURIE ANDERSON

For those of you who want to geek out on that, check out Walter Murch and his beautiful series. He’s one of the great film editors, but also one of the great sound theoreticians, and he is a really, really interesting writer, and you’ll get a lot of ideas from reading his books and checking out his theories on music and aleatoric music and math and the universe.

TODD L. BURNS

Are there any questions from the audience? I should have noted also that Laurie will be speaking a little bit afterwards, Jean-Michel has to go at a certain point, so obviously feel free to ask both of them questions, but if you definitely have a question for Jean-Michel.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Or comments, not any questions.

TODD L. BURNS

Or comments, of course.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Because we are only here for just discussions, and not questions. Discussing about what, or we can ask questions maybe, ask some questions.

TODD L. BURNS

If you can just wait for the microphone.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Check? Yes. It’s working. Hi. Thank you both for the talk, it was really moving, listening to your stories. This is not a question, but more of a thought. Even I feel like music is a very direct experience compared to other art forms, at least for me. It’s like, if you look at literature or something, there’s a lot of logic involved in the brain in converting the words to meaning, and then that meaning affecting you. Then music is just like… it’s just something that directly controls…you can feel it just when it happens itself, and it bypasses that whole logical aspect of it, and I think that’s kind of why I feel music is so powerful in the way it moves people. Yes. I just wanted to really…Yeah.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yes. You are right. I think that, I don’t know if music is specific. I thought about that when I was younger, that music was really different from any other thing, and I think it’s more like the same as breathing, as writing, as painting, it’s part of the same process going from this kind of strange, unknown travel from getting ideas and from the outside, and processing them inside, and then remitting them, in a sense, so where you are getting through with kind of…as we in French, from the outside to the inside, and just filtering them and then whatever it is, into poems, or writings and paintings or sounds.

I think that it’s the reason why I like what Laurie was saying about multimedia artists, even if I agree with her as well, to the fact that it doesn’t mean necessarily mean anything, but we have no… and this place is a multimedia place, and I think it should be explored more. Sometimes I still think that we are too much in our own ghettos. I mean, people of the visual, people of writing, and I think Red Bull Academy should think about this. I mean, maybe mixing also not only people who are musicians, but also people dealing with visual arts and words, because I think all this, by the end of the day, it’s more of the same. We have lots to learn from each other, I think.

LAURIE ANDERSON

I would say that, what you said about it being a little bit more direct. I would agree with that, because in the sense that it’s more physical, so that you can…it can make you dance, music can make your heart beat really fast, it can make you cry. I would say that, just a guess, but I would say that more people would cry at hearing their favorite song than if you walk into a museum and people are standing in front of their favorite painting crying.

I think things come through our eyes in a very different way. Not that it’s less meaningful, but it’s less immediately, physically provocative. Music, there is some music you hear and you just cannot not move. You must move. That’s a really powerful thing, it’s almost a puppeteering kind of thing. That’s really crazy power. I don’t see other art forms having that kind of power. I’ve noticed in, like, making films and things, that you can play against these different things. For example, words that come through your ears, and words that you only read. So imagine the kind of way that you analyze words that are only coming in through your eyes, and other ones that are said to you, and spoken and voiced.

There is a section in the film that I just did, which is only that you read very, very, very fast, and I invented this software for the Kronos Quartet, they had invited me to make a quartet. They said, “We want to tell stories.” I said, “Why would you tell stories, you have such great chops, why don’t you just play.” Besides, sometimes when musicians get up and do other things, like play percussion, or do theater stuff, it’s sort of, it’s better if they sit down and play, honestly.

Anyway I said, “I’ll write something so that you can tell stories with your instruments.” They said, “Great.” Then I said, “I don’t know how to do that.” I worked with software guy and we came up with this language program, so that as you play it triggers projected words, but in a way that’s super fast, super precise, so if someone is improvising, that’s the number of words you just read. You are going like, “Huh. I can read ten times faster than I thought,” which is kind of a thrill, but also you realize these are coming in a very different way. So sometimes, and I used those sometimes in a slower form, really to address the person in you that never speaks.

The one who is like the silent, the witness person, who is back there mostly using the more visual thing, just watching, watching you do things, so often getting kind of frustrating; like right now, for example, my inner person is wishing I wasn’t talking. Exactly, like, “Please.” Have you ever had this experience, like you are in the middle of some kind of conversation, and there’s just something, somebody rattling on going like this, blah-blah-blah, with some theory. You realize, that’s me, but you can’t stop. Your inner person is going, “You really have to stop talking, just stop now, because it’s better if you just stop, you are sounding idiotic, it’s babbling.” Language is addictive, and anyway…just an example of what I’m saying.

TODD L. BURNS

Are there any other questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I’m not sure if this is a question or a comment, but earlier you were talking about how to understand the people who have been identified as enemies and empathy,. I think a great way to do that is through sound, because, for example, 9/11, it’s a sound-based experience, hearing people in chaos, hearing people screaming hurt word, etc, etc… I think that…not just musicians necessarily, but people in general could understand the people who have been identified as other, if they related sound to their general experience, like what it’s like to hear a drone, like, routinely.

The use of police sirens, and Ferguson, etc., etc…, and the way that sound maps your body. I think that has yet to be explored in the way that it should. With the exception of like, Matthew Herbert, in that one album he did, where he sampled four minutes of a drone and made a 40-minute recording of it, following his One Pig album, so I think there’s a lot to be done there, yeah.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

It’s a very interesting comment. I think actually it’s a good way of understanding each other beyond words. We have this advantage as musicians, not necessarily using words. It’s strange in our world that actually, historically, music was music, and songs as an art form was a part of a generic genre of music, and ’50s and ’60s, it should be almost the reverse. For example, formerly lots of people are always asking me, “Why you are not putting words in your music?” I’m saying “The music, I don’t necessarily need words on it.” I think that the power of sound, as you said, can convey emotions in non-narrative way, which, I’m very interested by. The fact that music is creating, is probably the most interactive art form, because it’s allowed to create the soundtrack, the soundtrack of your own film, or of all your own movie, your own story, and you can create your own story from this.

Even if actually in a strange way where we could use words, and Laurie, in her work, in some previous work we’ve done together. I mean like, by using just phonemes or words that are not necessarily…yeah, sounds, and through sounds you can actually trigger the idea of creating, other people could create their own story from that, and I think a good way to understand other people, it’s also through…I mean, forgetting words, and the meaning of words, but going through and using sounds. I totally agree with this.

TODD L. BURNS

Anyone else?

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Just following what you were just saying about using sounds to connect with people, I think when things like what happened the other night happen these days often you’re finding out over Twitter and social media, and there’s a disconnect, because there are no sounds, it’s just words, and that’s basically the main way that news travels these days. How do you think that changes things?

LAURIE ANDERSON

That’s a really good point, because it’s news with already an opinion, it’s already mediated by one thing, so you are getting farther and farther away from the experience. Yeah, it might be really interesting to do news that was just pure sound of what it really was like there. And mic it in a different way, too. Probably the worst sound is a human voice crying. That gets everybody, every time. Or, human sounds, like you are saying.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

For those of you, for instance you have some plug-ins, I mean, actually IRCAM is doing, we were talking about this, just previously. Like, for instance, you take the speech, and you get rid of one of the three parameters in the sound of speech, which is the formant, and the noise, and the frequency, the sine wave. By just cancelling one of these three parameters, the speech is not understandable anymore, but you keep the music, and it’s quite interesting because we all have our own music, and I think that it’s not neutral, all right, so it’s not neutral. In a way, we know for instance, you have in, I don’t know, in an amphitheater, on the whole you can have people, giving lectures, and it’s very interesting what they say, but nobody cares.

You have other people doing silly things, and having no particularly interesting thought, but they will capture the audience, just because of the music, of their music, and it’s quite interesting. It could be quite interesting to think about CNN without words, but just sounds, to see where that goes.

LAURIE ANDERSON

I think one of the reasons that words and pictures dominate the news is because you can say, “Terrorist attack, and six pictures,” and it takes three seconds, and sound unravels in time, and so it can’t do that. You’ll have to find another way to convey something. We are in a culture that is very short. The story has to be three seconds.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

That will just…

LAURIE ANDERSON

Maybe there’s a way to do that with sound, I’m not sure how, but…

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Yes, yes and no, because it’s very interesting to see that this generation and your generation is about to zap three seconds on YouTube, but you can also sit for a whole weekend to watch the entire series of Game of Thrones, or True Detective for 24 hours without sleeping and without stopping, it’s something quite new, which was not existing even ten years ago.

LAURIE ANDERSON

You need sound for those.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

You need sound for those.

LAURIE ANDERSON

It would be pointless without it.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

That’s right.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Those would really be any

TODD L. BURNS

To some news channels’ credit, I actually on Friday night was watching the news, and there was this section that was called “No Comment,” and it was just literally watching some sort of-

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

I love this; this is Euronews…

TODD L. BURNS

hospital or something.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Euronews has a very interesting…some of you probably don’t know this channel, it’s a European channel, and they have this fantastic item called, actually, “No Comment,” and it’s no words, just pictures and in silence, in silence, total silence, no music, just total silence. Actually, I know the people from Euronews and they recorded ten different types of silences, because they are broadcasting in Romania, in Germany, France and lots of countries. They were European countries most of time, and they recorded, one guy, considered quite crazy, but quite interesting for the discussion we have. Actually he went to record ten different silences in the country, they are broadcasting to this “No Comment” thing, and it’s quite interesting. It makes me think about Stanley Kubrick, maybe you know that. For 2001 he recorded lots of different silences, he sent lots of sound engineers to record different type of silence; the silence of the desert, the silence of country, which is not silence. Total silence is difficult to get.

TODD L. BURNS

Anyone else? Yes?

VIVIAN HOST

Thank you guys for being here. That was a very inspiring chat. I was wondering of either of you had seen any art that was a response to a tragedy, or a political event, or a world event, that you felt was particularly moving or effective, or just ingenious, or creating a new conversation about something. Anything from a tsunami to 9/11 to…

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

I can answer that. There is one thing in my mind just now, it’s actually when Solidarno?? happened in Poland, they had this hymn, anthem, that suddenly came out called “Mury” that was made by the…it was an old song, but suddenly all the workers, the dockers in this place I mean, just used this music, and they started, and it became a strong anthem, but not as an anthem for something, just an anthem for them, for the place, for the location, and it was…I played there some years ago, and we played that track, that song.

It was amazing to listen to this piece of music in the place it has been born for political reasons. Because for people who don’t know, the docks of Gdansk, is where Lech Wa??sa with few dockers and few workers, it’s just a bunch of people, they actually changed the world by killing the Soviet Union system. It was as simple and as big as that. Just the song, I mean, just had been created at that moment, and this is something I’m sure that lots of examples are existing, but it’s very interesting what you are saying about this relationship of the instant of the catastrophe or something, and suddenly you have some music or art form emerging.

You have that also enduring with your street art obviously, with what you could see in the Berlin Wall, for instance, not only around the world, but the first street art and graffiti, it’s just when the Berlin Wall, the wall has been built, are quite amazing compared to the one that had been done afterwards. Those ones in the instant have that kind of very strange role, power, and I think that it’s a very interesting point to explore that. It would be interesting to know more about this kind of music, because I’m sure that lots of, I don’t know if you have personal experience, knowledge about that, it’s very interesting point about what happened during…

I think that in concentration camp, I mean people also, I was then just briefly talking about my mom being in the French Resistance, and she was, she had been in the concentration camp, and she’s told me that people were actually creating songs in one night, because they knew that they were going to be probably dead the following day. Suddenly you have musicians and they are composing some, improvising some chants, and obviously that is also another example.

LAURIE ANDERSON

One of my favorite pieces of music of all time is “Quartet for the End of Time,” Messiaen, who composed it in a concentration camp also. Incredibly joyful, beautiful piece of music, but one which was, had what you are saying, a sense of time, that it’s about time that was almost over. It’s the subject of the piece as well, but it’s funny because all of the musical lines take their time, and they are just, they feel like they have all the time in the world to unrole their phrases, and they are so lyrical and lovely. It is not like, “Oh, well, we have only three seconds.” It just does the opposite, it kind of blooms, it’s a magnificent piece of work if you haven’t heard it, check it out, “Quartet for the End of Time” by Messiaen, it’s really, really…it has this special relationship to time, it really does.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

It’s interesting about what we are discussing altogether, I mean, that fact that actually, in a sense I think that you have to be happy to create sad songs, because when you are really sad, and we are confronting tragedy, I think the survival instinct makes you probably compose something optimistic, and joyful, exactly what were saying with Messiaen, it’s exactly that.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Yeah. The movie that I just finished called Heart of a Dog is… the center of it is a thing that one of my teachers said, which is, you should try to practice how to feel sad without actually being sad.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Exactly.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Which is not that easy to do; of course the idea is that there are so many sad things in the world, and if you push them away, if you pretend they are not there, We are just like, “They are going to come and they are going to find you, and they are bite you, and they can hit you over the ahead, they will.” They are there. The idea, though, is get it, and then do not become it. You see a person linger, a person who has basically says, “We are here to have a very, very, very, very good time. That’s what we are here for. That’s what we are here, that’s our job here,” so don’t get distracted. Or think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who has advice for writers, who would say, “Listen, just try to imagine that you are holding two opposite ideas, one in each hand, they are absolutely opposing ideas, and they are also each totally true. Try to hold those things without going crazy, and that’s how to write.”

I think that’s good advice, because often we are sort of encouraged to choose, “This is the better one.” I said, of course, as we know, it’s very circumstantial, it’s very point of view, what you think is good, there are certain things that are better for you at the moment. Anyways, some of those exercises in duality I think are really good to keep in mind.

TODD L. BURNS

I think that’s a wonderful note to stop here on. Please help me thanking both of you for being here today. We really appreciate it.

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE

Thank you.

LAURIE ANDERSON

Thank you.