page_title: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra
section_title: Ives songs made into dissertation
hierarchical_section_title: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra / Background / Ives songs made into dissertation
caption_attribution_description: 114 Songs
context_page_description: Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra is an internationally acclaimed jazz album produced by Planet Arts Recordings and released in August 2014. The recording is centered on Charles Ives' art song arranged for 17 piece jazz orchestra by composer Jack Cooper; this is a Third stream approach to jazz made more widely known by earlier band leaders and composers such as Paul Whiteman, Gunther Schuller, George Russell and Don Sebesky. The album is archived in the both the United States Library of Congress and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek as a historically significant sound recording.
  Noted Ives scholar Gayle Magee writes,"These recordings preserve the essence of classics...while offering a fresh, modern reinterpretation for Ives fans and jazz enthusiasts alike." The album was named as one of the Top 10 Jazz CDs for 2014 in the Chicago Tribune by music critic Howard Reich and also peaked at #8 in radio airplay in the Roots Music Report for top albums in Canada for October 26, 2014.
context_section_description: Cooper first attended classes at the UT Austin in late 1995; one of those was with musicologist Elliott Antokoletz.  In Antokoletz' book Twentieth Century Music (Prentice Hall), Chapter 7 is devoted to music in the United States and specifically Charles Ives is analyzed for 10 pages.    Elliott Antokoletz uses Ives' The Cage as a key departure point.  The Cage ended up becoming the first of the Ives works Cooper arranged for jazz orchestra; an experiment on how to use more disparate 'Americana' material to arrange and orchestrate rather than typical 'tin pan alley' songs. Cooper's arrangements preserve Ives' work while undergoing a transformation to a jazz aesthetic, "...(the) unexpected places we hear in jazz, and wanna' hear in jazz."
  In 1997 Cooper undertook a dissertation project to find music suitable for jazz orchestra that would push the boundaries of how to orchestrate in that idiom.  This was a Third Stream approach of melding a prominent American classical composer with the idiom of full 17 piece jazz orchestra. Charles Ives music was decided upon due to the composer's distinctly American style and approach to melodically and harmonically challenging material. The fundamental idea was to use Ives’ “vocal lieder” written for piano and voice much the way arrangers have used songs of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, or Duke Ellington as the inspiration for large jazz orchestra source material (his most basic ideas). Over 160 songs of Ives songs were considered and a master list was derived from numerous volumes of song collections, the Complete Songs of Charles Ives (in four volumes) were used as the primary audio reference.  The lengthy process of making master lists and doing study of many Ives’ songs was vital to eventually completing the Mists album.
  The first three works used in that dissertation were The Cage, The Last Reader and Tom Sails Away; the work is listed as a noted text in both "Charles Ives: A Guide to Research" and "A Charles Ives omnibus".   Cooper's orchestrations of The Cage and Tom Sails Away were also recorded on CDs by university jazz ensembles. These would later become studio demo recordings for record labels.  Both the Mists recording and treatise are housed in the University of Texas Libraries for artists and researchers.
  In mid-January 1998 a visit was made by Cooper to the Gilmore Music Library at Yale University in New Haven, CT in order to study the archives of Charles Ives’ music; the original manuscripts with Ives hand written notes and corrections.  At that time Cooper also met with noted Ives scholar James Sinclair. A great deal of important information and analysis was obtained that would help complete both the dissertation and writing of the rest of the five works for the Mists album.
caption: 114 Songs of Charles Ives was the main song book used for the Mists project, over 160 songs were on a master list.
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