Davóne Tines takes us to church in Recital No. 1: MASS

As concertgoers, many of us are accustomed to a traditional one-sided paradigm. We enter the hall, take our seats, and wait for the performer to respond to the questions posed by our expectant gaze: What have you prepared for us? Why have you brought us here today? 

Davóne Tines is not a traditional artist, and in his poignant powerhouse of a debut recital, entitled MASS, that conversation goes both ways. There is no doubt about who is in the spotlight — Tines combines an arresting stage presence with the kind of voice capable of shaking the rafters or lifting the weariest soul — but as we watch and listen, he invites us to bring our active attention to meet his. “What are you worried about?” asks the first in a series of projected texts, set starkly in white caps against the dark rear wall. “What would you give up to end that worry? What are you thankful for?”

It’s a gambit that pays off richly over the course of nearly an hour of spectacularly wide-ranging selections, touching on everything from Baroque opera to spirituals to 20th-century minimalism, all framed atop an a cappella setting of the Catholic mass created for Tines by the composer Caroline Shaw. The staggering variety of repertoire, another non-traditional choice, reflects Tines’s respect for the complex humanity of his audience, distinct individuals who remain inextricably linked: “There are many different ways to enter. You can enter if you like a certain genre of music. You can enter if you understand the structure of the Catholic mass. And most importantly, you can enter simply because you’re a human who’s had experiences, and everyone has dealt with problems in their life.”

“A tool for dealing with personal, human problems”: the genesis of MASS

Tines’s willingness to break with convention in search of the most authentic mode of expression is not surprising, considering his unconventional route to the highest echelon of the performance world. Though he was always musical, having studied piano and violin before earning a degree in sociology at Harvard, his first career after college was in arts administration rather than onstage. “I had a very full view of how the arts worked,” he says, “before I decided I actually wanted to become a singer.” 

But he and his voice were destined for bigger things, and after he had earned his master’s degree studying voice at Juilliard, that experience behind the scenes made him well positioned to forge a path that best suited the person and artist he was: “Seeing as I didn’t come from conservatory,” he explains, “and I had a broad experience in the performing arts beyond simply classical or opera, I have a broad taste; I have a broad array of things within classical and outside of classical that I’m very interested in exploring.”

Tines channeled that all-encompassing perspective into MASS, which he designed with great care and intention. “I didn’t want to give a formal classical recital,” he tells me. “I thought it was of another time and of a context that I didn’t feel comfortable in.” But in talking with his good friend, the opera director and producer Zack Winokur, Tines saw how he could tweak the format in a way that was meaningful to him as an artist: “I realized that in the most original sense, a recital is an artistic statement — it’s something that a singer or musician utilizes to tell who they are. If I was to engage that prompt very earnestly, I wanted to introduce myself by telling the story of where I’ve come from, and in thinking about the musics that I’ve been involved with up to this point, I realized it was all liturgical in some way.”

Tines’s vision of the liturgy is a product of disparate faiths and experiences. He grew up in the Black Baptist church in rural northern Virginia, but also went on to sing at the most important Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches in America, as well as in Renaissance polyphony choirs at Harvard. What he observed was that at their core, all these practices represented “different dialectics for groups of people to access a similar thing: an idea of spirituality or a place for self-reflection or even connection.” Putting them into conversation with each other showed him that across these religious traditions, “the literature can be utilized as simply a tool for dealing with personal human problems.”

Unlike the Black Baptist church that had shaped Tines — a place where “everything is felt” and “music is very visceral [and] has a very clear meaning and intention,” he sensed, in the Catholic church, a certain disconnect: “These are extremely huge and far-reaching texts… [But] the spirit of the thing wasn’t really felt in the context of the religious practice.” He aimed to remedy that by using the structure of the Catholic mass — “a ritual that’s existed for centuries [and] warrants investigation as to why it stood the test of time … by filling it with music that I thought could illustrate the depth and the passion and specificity within each section.”

It was in this context that Tines asked Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw to compose a miniature a cappella mass, with the movements serving as “introductions, almost title cards” to each new section that Tines then “filled with a piece of music from the Baroque repertoire or contemporary Black music or American song — different things that I have affinity for, that I feel connected to, that I thought best illustrated those ideas.”

To accompany him through the emotionally charged terrain of MASS, Tines needed “somebody who was willing to come on the journey with me, and also share in the leading of that journey” — and in Aspen, he is joined by the Afro-Dominican pianist John Bitoy, whom Tines met through a network of colleagues. Bitoy “grew up a Rachmaninov prodigy and then slowly found his way into the jazz scene, but still maintains this extreme dexterity within classical and technical repertoire,” Tines says. Before the bass-baritone takes the stage, Bitoy opens the program with the Bach-Busoni chorale prelude “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” bringing “a sensitivity and an exploratory quality to Bach that I think sets the tone for this recital.” 

“Complicatedly and beautifully many things at once”: the music of MASS

We hear Tines’s voice before we see him, and immediately, every atom inside Harris Concert Hall attunes to his frequency. He slowly makes his entrance while singing Shaw’s striking, mournful Kyrie, a plea for mercy that sounds against the projected text, “What are you worried about?” The Kyrie leads seamlessly into “Leave me, loathsome light” from Handel’s Semele, which showcases Tines’s ease in Baroque repertoire. He says that this aria, sung by the character of Somnus, is “about someone wanting to leave the light of the world: they want to return to sleep, they want to return to night. So that idea of Kyrie, crying out for mercy, I think, recontextualizes or points more clearly at the meaning of this aria by Somnus. It’s somebody who feels affronted and needs mercy from existing in a certain place, so they’re asking that they can leave.”

After Shaw’s Agnus Dei, Tines moves seamlessly from the Baroque period to the era of the spiritual, in a present-day setting by Tyshawn Sorey. “As an African American person,” Tines tells me, “spirituals are a very critical part of my own tradition, but also a really critical part of the American song tradition. Spirituals were some of the first original American music and have continued to evolve into what we understand broadly as popular music. There’s a real lineage there, and so I wanted to represent this quintessential part of my own lineage, but also the American lineage.” He worked with Sorey, who has won a MacArthur Genius Grant and a Pulitzer Prize, and who “has this really special world about him. He takes things that you think you commonly know, but kind of rips the sheen off of them to show the darker psychology. So I wanted audiences to engage these songs for their emotional depth, not just their beauty.” 

Tines pairs “Were You There” with Sorey’s plaintive refiguring of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and the heart-rending “To a Brown Girl Dead,” a poem by Harlem Renaissance legend Countee Cullen set to music by the great Margaret Bonds. Thematically resonant with the preceding Agnus Dei, Bonds’s song is “about the sacrifice of one of the most vulnerable, yet important, parts of society.”

To follow the Credo, which Shaw sets as “a monolithic statement — instead of explicating the idea of belief, she simply posits the word: ‘I believe,’” Tines has chosen the sublime “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” (Make yourself pure, my heart) from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. To hear it is to agree with Tines that it is “one of the most beautiful things ever written for low voice… I love that it is so extremely personal, and it’s someone asking to be changed, saying ‘make me pure’ or ‘make me anew.’ And so in the realm of dealing with the problem, this prayer for change is critical.”

In the next section, Shaw’s Gloria “shifts the energy of the program into a place of exaltation. There’s been a lot of reflection, a lot of internal contemplation, but now is the time to express gratitude for the possibility of change.” The vibe remains uplifting with a setting of “Give Me Jesus” by Moses Hogan, which gives Bitoy, who is “very steeped in the jazz tradition and a composer in his own right,” a prime opportunity to demonstrate his abilities. Bitoy and Tines have “continued to play with and morph and improvise on Hogan’s setting. So we really use what he wrote as a blueprint for a more personal, in-the-moment rendering of the song.”

Alongside the undeniable power and precision of Tines’s bass-baritone, he has a remarkable range and loves to sing in a high falsetto. The word “Sanctus” means “holy,” and Shaw set her Sanctus “in a very high falsetto to give it a very otherworldly quality.” This holy quality is then embodied by the figure of Joan of Arc, the subject of what is arguably the pièce de résistance of Tines’s program: the Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc by Julius Eastman. If you’ve only recently heard of Eastman, it may be thanks to Tines, who has helped spearhead a renewed interest in this “incredible composer, singer, and pianist who was kind of pushed out of the canon because he was black and gay and extremely outspoken about his identity.”

Eastman was totally absent from the canon in Tines’s studies at Harvard and Juilliard, and he wanted to rectify that. “As a black gay singer,” he says, “who composes and creates in my own right, if I had had him as a guiding star, I think I would have been able to go in different and deeper directions in the development of myself as an artist and in my career. So I consider it critical to include Eastman in a personal statement of mine, and I also want to offer an experience of Eastman to audiences. This piece is really incredible because it’s about his praise of, and almost obsession with, the character of Joan of Arc — someone from a very alternate identity who utilized her force and passion and spirit to make change.”

Eastman’s Prelude is a masterpiece of a cappella minimalism, weaving a wondrous amount of texture, powerful emotion, and livewire tension with just a few words, melodic gestures, and dynamic variations. Everyone in Harris Hall holds their breath as we savor that suspense and wait for it to resolve — which it does, in glorious fashion, with the soulful “Vigil,” which serves as the concluding Benedictus for the mass. The piece came out of an improvisatory session between Tines and Amsterdam-based composer Igee Dieudonné, who have enjoyed riffing together in the style of artists from Benjamin Britten all the way to Björk. In this case, Tines has “always felt that there was a connection between gospel and French Impressionism… And this song, which is kind of an odd and beautiful hybrid, came out of that exploration.”

As soon as Tines’s delicate final Hallelujah, and Bitoy’s last Debussy-esque chords, ring out, the audience leaps to its feet. The projected text now reads “thank you,” but the gratitude is amply reciprocated: a woman in front of me turns to her companion and gushes, breathlessly, “That must be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Judging by our collective reaction, I think that the crowd applauding around me, made up of all different age groups and backgrounds, would agree that this big-hearted, expansive program is something very special — and its universal appeal is the result of careful intention. “People are multifaceted,” says Tines. “We all like different things, we like different cuisines, we like different modes of dress. We all have different emotions and ways of being. And I think my choosing a broad array of music is just honoring the fact that myself and all people are multifaceted, and we are all complicatedly and beautifully many things at once.”