“What is my hand in this?
While you listen to this song,
Will you try to right your wrong, asking,
What is my hand in this?”

Davóne Tines, one of today’s most compelling classical singers, wrote the song “What is My Hand in This?” excerpted above, and performed it in a Feb. 5 concert with Ruckus, a period instrument group with a rock-band streak. The 550-seat Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton filled only a little more than half its seats, and what a bummer that so many were empty.  A lot more people could have heard this moving program and history lesson during Black History Month before Trump likely declares that designation illegal or too “woke” amid his ongoing outrageous racist comments and commentary.

The hour-long concert, entitled “What is Your Hand in This” and designed primarily by Tines and Ruckus bassist and composer Douglas Adam August Balliett and presented by the Friends of Chamber Music and The Reser, was a hopeful and sometimes rousing plea for a better world. Its music unspooled in a multi-genre concert with talented performers who refuse to be wedged into any kind of box.

Tines is an imposing man with the broad chest and impeccable posture of an opera singer, which he is sometimes. He opened the Anthony Davis updated version of X at the Detroit Opera in 2022, starring as Malcolm X, and, several years before that, pulled off a 7-minute aria as an escaped slave in Matthew AuCoin’s 2015 “Crossing” about Walt Whitman’s fictionalized Civil War experience.

Tines’s vocal range stretches from low D to high E-flat, he can sustain his energy for impossible amounts of time, seamlessly shape-shift the repertoire from spirituals to arias, and convey the meaning of different kinds of music – if  he cares about it. He saves his voice for music and messages he believes in.

Tines was the glowing center of the Reser show, singing and narrating, but the instrumental musicians encircling him made a terrific rhythm section, with seven artists juggling more than seven instruments. Elliot Figg moved back and forth among harpsichord, piano and electric keyboard; Clay Zeller-Townson played baroque bassoon, taille, and a little percussion; Paul Holmes Morton performed on the baroque guitar; Keir GoGwilt and Shelby Yamin played violin, and Manami Mizumoto was on viola. The group looked as if they’d pulled their on-stage clothes from the back of a dark closet, but their music was bright, playful, original, and accomplished. Ruckus and Tines performed this concert at the end of January at Carnegie Hall so these musicians are at the top of the musical chain.

The concert’s 23 pieces began with Stephen Foster’s mid-19th-century “Beautiful Dreamer,” which is mercifully empty of minstrel themes and has been covered by the Beatles and Bing Crosby, among others. An arrangement of George Frideric Handel’s “Why Do the Nations so Furiously Rage” from The Messiah; spirituals, such as “Be the Lover of My Soul”; soulman’s Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”; and several folk tunes. All of these alternated with pieces from Balliett’s 2025 Compassion Preludes.

“The House I Live In,” sung by Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, took its original inspiration from a song by Lewis Allen and Earl Robinson about post-war anti-Semitism, but as usual and once again, Tines and Baillett rearranged it and made it their own, with Tines writing a couple of verses.

Some angry songs, including Handel’s “rage aria” and “This Bitter Earth”, made famous by Dinah Washington in the 1960s, carry out the theme of watching the world broken-heartedly, lamenting inequality and slavery, and moving on.

“This bitter earth
Well, what a fruit it bears
What good is love
That no one shares”

“To the White People of America” and Sawney Freeman’s “The New Death March” were part of the performance. Freeman, a violinist born into slavery in 1769, was one of the earliest known Black American composers.

In a haunting Julius Eastman piece called “Buddha,” Tines opened his mouth and throat and moved up and down scales, making different shapes with his mouth, creating an eerie long-toned “song,” where he held sustained notes. Could he have been in the belly of the Buddha? The program notes explained that “any performer may take any line and react to the musical moment, creating a sustained and tense sonic meditation.” Of minimalist ilk, “Buddha” illustrated Ruckus’s improvisational genius and creativity and Tines’s exciting sure-footed versatile voice. Tines was miced and that certainly wasn’t necessary. His voice carries like an opera singer’s that he sometimes is.

But back to the concert “What Is Your Hand in This?” and to Tines’s song “What is My Hand in This,” about taking personal responsibility for positive change. He wrote it when he was invited to entertain at a swank Christmas party for some of the wealthiest people in New York City. He took the occasion as “an opportunity not to entertain but to speak directly and imploringly to a room of the 1 percent with the subtext: You in this room have the power to affect great change, so what is your hand in contributing,” he explains in the program notes.

He saved the song until the end of the Reser concert. Tines had the audience clapping and stomping with him to bring his point home: participation is key to making change. Like any great singer, he is a master storyteller and he delivers his message, usually about a more just world, with power and passion. He has a master’s degree in Vocal Performance from The Juilliard School preceded by a Harvard University bachelor’s degree in sociology. He said in my interview with him four years ago for Classical Voice North America that he is intent on saying who he is, on choosing the music he sings, and being the political person he aspires to be as a gay Black man, as he often refers to himself. He favors a “more flexible way of looking at things that I connect to or that fit me the best.” Davóne, by the way, is the name of a bridge that his mother loved  – and she loved the beautiful sound of the word – Tines said in my 2022 interview. His mother remains insistent, according to Tines, that the accent mark goes in the correct direction (accent aigu) over the correct letter (the “o”).

As part of his individuality and desire to broaden the way we hear voices, Tines calls his voice a bass cantante rather than bass-baritone. With the bass cantante, the high upper extension can turn into falsetto and the lower register literally booms. With his three-octave range, it’s easy for him to transition from early music to traditional American hymns or folk tunes. Confident of every note in those octaves, he can bring you to tears over such simple spirituals as “Give Me Jesus.”

Which he didn’t sing Feb. 5, though he often performed that song as a kid in the Providence Baptist Church choir in Orlean, VA, about 50 miles west of Washington, DC, where his grandfather conducted three choirs, his mother sang and his brother played cello. Tines played violin for a while, but gave it up a few years ago when his voice took over his time, passion, and career.

During the show he did sing “Be the Lover of My Soul,” a traditional tune that Tines arranged. If that didn’t bring you to tears or inspire that barely bearable sensation that occurs when something you see or hear touches you, the closing  “Nunc Dimittis,” part of Balliett’s Compassion Preludes, offered another chance. That closing piece was an emotional, yet tranquil benediction. A rough translation from the Latin is “Now you let the servant depart in peace.” The piece mixes up and modernizes hymns and prayers and folk songs. It adds humor and wit to blessings heard over and over again. The prayer becomes inclusive and the message free-spirited and lighthearted.

The final piece shone with that very intentional stamp of Balliett and Tines. It was a fitting end to an eloquent and inspirational – if too short – performance.

“Now let us go in peace
The word has been fulfilled
Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the coming of the day
When a light will reveal to the nation
The glory of its people
Glory to the Father and to the Son
And the Mother and Daughter and actually
To everyone
As it was in the beginning is now and will be forever.
Amen.”