Saturday, August 9
A Recital by Davóne Tines bass-baritone and
John Bitoy piano

A Recital by Davóne Tines, bass-baritone and John Bitoy, piano

By Marcus Pyle

With themes of spirituality, racial reckoning, and existentialism, this recital is an appeal to the better angels of our nature. It is music in service of morality—music turned outward—implicating the audience in a moment of self-reflection, asking the question, “How will you do better?”

This is no ordinary Mass ordinary (Latin: ordinarium missae)—in Tines’s ordering, Kyrie (Lord, have mercy), Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), Credo (I believe), Gloria (Glory to God), and Sanctus (Holy, holy, holy). Although the recital is structured around Caroline Shaw’s partial setting of this ancient text in a miniature mass composed especially for Davóne Tines, there are intercessions by disparate compositional voices and styles. It has more in common with a Jazz set—heterogeneous, seemingly improvisatory—than with a Christian mass. Recital No. 1: MASS stages a drama from darkness to light, from interiority to communal music-making. It is an incantatory, heterodox program that enacts a dialogue between Western classical sacred forms (the mass and cantatas), Black sacred forms (Negro spirituals and Gospel), and across epochs (pairing J. S. Bach with contemporary composers like Tyshawn Sorey and Caroline Shaw). It is a refusal of canonicity within a canonical form.

According to Tines, “I was always cross-pollinating and trying to rationalize how all of these things exist together. What I found was, it’s different versions of the exact same story, which is: identifying a problem, the Kyrie; Agnus Dei—knowing that something has to be sacrificed in order to make change, because that’s what change is, something goes away or changes; Credo—believing that change can happen. Gloria is rejoicing in the fact that that change has happened, or that there’s the possibility of change. And Sanctus is an acknowledgement of how special the possibility of this process is, that there actually is some sort of road to move on from whatever tension they feel to a release.”

These cross-pollinations (adaptations, intertexts, arrangements, resonances) thematize W.E.B. Du Bois’s existential question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” In a society replete with racial brutality, injustice, and suffering, music compels us to ask: How can one endure and create in such conditions? People often turn to a higher being in such circumstances. But for many African Americans, the relationship with Christianity can be complex: it was used to justify enslavement and violence, but it has also been a salvatory balm against those very injustices and a source of resistance.

In the beginning, J. S. Bach’s Advent chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Savior of the nations, come), BWV 659 serves as an invocation of spirit and as a prelude to the Mass. The solo piano piece—husky and brooding in Busoni’s transcription—heralds a redeemer who has come to save those living immorally.

Caroline Shaw’s Mass setting is for voice alone. Her melismatic settings of these liturgical texts frame what is to come. Shaw’s Kyrie and Handel’s “Leave me, loathsome light” set out this formal precedent while introducing us to a throughgoing tension in the recital—somnambulance versus wokeness. The Handel aria, taken from the opera Semele, is sung by Somnus, the Roman god of sleep. Somnus, twin brother of Death, wants to remain asleep. “O murmur, murmur me again to Peace,” he pleads. This program, too, will hum and chant toward peace.

The Agnus Dei section is a lamentation of lives lost, desolate and elegiac. Sorey’s Were you there? from Songs of Death is a reimagination of the Negro spiritual bearing the same name. It is a song of direct address that asks the listener to put themselves in the context of bearing witness to torture and crucifixion. Can you envision the psychic turmoil that comes from such an event? In Sorey’s dirge-like recomposition, these “sorrow songs” render the spiritual darker; the song becomes more akin to Tines’s understanding of these songs—especially Swing Low, Sweet Chariot—as “suicide notes.” It is the post-traumatic burden of a person who bore witness to atrocities and was stunned into inaction.

The next song introduces another Biblical allusion, this one courtesy of queer Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. In To a Brown Girl, Dead, Cullen compares a Black woman to the Black Madonna. As set by the African American composer Margaret Bonds, the poem raises more questions than it answers—a woman buried by her mother; a wedding ring pawned for a funeral gown. It culminates in a conditional statement: What if? What if the body did not perish prematurely? Resonances with the #SayHerName movement, honoring those whose lives were circumscribed by police brutality, are unavoidable. Sandra Bland. Atatiana Jefferson. Breonna Taylor.

In spite of such wickedness, there remains a belief in the salvation of a higher being. With the Credo, the music returns to Shaw and Bach. A bass aria from the latter part of St. Matthew’s Passion recounts a moment of intimacy with the crucified body of Christ; Joseph of Arimathea tenderly lays the slain corpse to rest and lets Christ into his heart. It is a musical representation of two souls intertwining, a duty of care, and a testimony of responsibility and care for the other.

Moses Hogan’s setting of the spiritual Give Me Jesus serves as a counterpoint to Bach’s aria of care. These middle parts of the mass shift the tone towards a celebration of faith, steadfastness, and resolve. Tines outlines the limits of his range and pushes notes to the edges of duration to musically paint everlasting glory—ineffable and interminable. This recital program posits that the search for meaning—spiritually, personally, musically—resonates across times and timbres; a call for the body of Christ rhymes with the sentiments of a Gospel hymn.

Spirituals have been important elements in Black recitals from the late 1800s to the present day. They allow for artistic license rooted in individual technique, they signify belonging to a community, they serve as acts of resistance, and they gesture toward shared culture. Spirituals have also been contested sites demarcating Blackness and belonging in the Western classical community. Antonin Dvořák argued that these sorrow songs represent the backbone of American musical innovation, while others have denigrated them as “folk music”—pure sentiment without artistic merit. But, as Kira Thurman writes quoting Theodor Lierhammer, “African American spirituals, like Bach or Heinrich Schütz’s cantatas . . . met ‘on the common ground of purpose, feeling, and fitting form,’ and shared the same musical poetic style and religious spirit.”

Shaw’s Sanctus begins hushed and spins into a frenzy of notes. It enacts a kind of invocation. That mesmeric and trancelike invitation to holiness is amplified by Julius Eastman’s Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, where a solo baritone intones a song, entranced. The music is a minimalist cadenza, a sonic séance, a monomaniacal meditation. Eastman—for whom queerness and Blackness reappear as motifs across his oeuvre—wrote to the saint, “Dear Joan, when meditating on your name I am given strength and dedication. . . . I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present; I shall emancipate myself from myself.” Eastman was not only communicating across realms; he was also channeling Joan’s queerness and defiance. It is as if to say: All that is holy is emancipatory.

Igee Dieudonné’s VIGIL provides a musical exhalation that invites light. The composer, whose surname translates to “God-given,” offers a warm and shimmering musical embrace. It provides comfort by reaffirming that “where there is darkness, we’ll bring light.” Here, the vigil is not only a wake for the deceased, but also a sonic awakening that asks what light we can personally conjure in dark times. It reminds us to be vigilant, to “stay woke” to abuses of power, to keep watch over those less fortunate. It reminds us that this too shall pass. As Octavia E. Butler wrote in The Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” Or, as Tines himself has said, “asking someone to contend with themselves or asking a society to contend with itself. That’s what the Mass is: a ritual of walking through a process of hoping for change.”

— © Marcus Pyle

Davóne Tines is a pathbreaking artist whose work encompasses a diverse repertoire ranging from early music to new commissions by leading composers while exploring the social issues of today. A creator, curator, and performer at the intersection of many histories, cultures, and aesthetics, he is engaged in work that blends opera, art song, spirituals, contemporary Classical, Gospel, and protest songs as a means to tell a deeply personal story of perseverance connecting to all of humanity. Tines is an artist who takes full agency of his work, often devising new programs and pieces from conception to performance. He has premiered numerous operas by today’s leading composers, including John Adams, Terence Blanchard, and Matthew Aucoin, and his concert appearances include performances of works ranging from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to Kaija Saariaho’s True Fire. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2024 performing in John Adams’s El Niño. His first studio album, ROBESOИ (2024), released on Nonesuch Records, explores his connection to legendary American baritone Paul Robeson by reimagining the music Robeson famously sang. Tines is Brooklyn Academy of Music’s artist-in-residence and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale’s first-ever creative partner. He is a recipient of the 2018 Emerging Artists Award from Lincoln Center, a winner of the 2020 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Musical America’s 2022 Vocalist of the Year, and a recipient of the 2024 Chanel Next Prize. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School and Harvard University, and is the recipient of the prestigious 2025 Harvard Arts Medal.

John Bitoy is a versatile composer, pianist, and artistic director from Chicago, Illinois. John’s work as an artist and producer is multi-disciplinary and spans genres from Jazz to Classical, drawing inspiration from diverse global traditions. John earned his master’s degree in piano performance from DePaul University and acts as artistic director of the Second Floor, a Black-owned performance and event space on the West Side of Chicago. John’s focus as an artist and organizer is on bringing sounds and stories of Black resistance from the African diaspora to U.S. and international audiences.