This Modern World

Again Stan Kenton presents the most stimulating of new music…music that extends the limits of the popular field? For This Modern World is a bold, arresting piece of work…as challenging to the listener, in its way, as the dynamic age in which we live!

The admiration of modern musicians for Stan Kenton’s tremendous vitality is equalled only by his own great enthusiasm for the new ideas of talented young composers. Bob Graettinger is such a composer—intense, conscientious, and fortified by the confidence and encouragement of the nation’s outstanding jazz leader. Out of that mutual respect comes this album : a dazzling premiere performance by instrumentalists of the highest caliber—the “Innovations” orchestra, directed by Stan Kenton!

“The way I hear music is in a series of constantly changing tensions. What i hear isn’t individual melodies or harmonies, but something more like abstract shapes in motion—physical things passing through time.” This is the intriguing concept of musical sound that young composer Bob Graettinger brings to his work. t reflects world deeply concerned with the pressures and energy and time, and in This Modern World he expresses that view in unique and brilliant fashion.

He has titled its sections simply. A Horn, Some Saxophones, A Cello, A Thought, A Trumpet, and An Orchestra. They vary in instrumentation between the five performers in Some Saxophones and the forty men of Stan Kenton’s “Innovations” orchestra in A Cello. In three of the sections a featured instrumental soloist represent [sic] an abstract individual in the orchestral environment, and the ensemble sections range in mood from tranquility to screaming violence, as the composer portrays his impression of the world about him.

Graettinger’s writing methods and styles are most unusual. He uses mathematical computations in his work, like an architect calculating the necessary physical support for his artistic conception. In making notations he employs a striking system of color charts and graphs (their interesting visual patterns have been adapted for this album’s cover).

He has spent over year on this composition, his first to be recorded since the controversial City of Glass. Like the work of any sincere modernist, it is not designed for easy acceptance; but the open-minded listener will find in it a creative imagination that is exciting, dramatic, and greatly rewarding.