San Francisco Performances: Davóne Tines & Ruckus

Last Saturday I was back in Herbst Theater to hear bass-baritone Davóne Tines & Ruckus (who were joined by the Concert Choir of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, directed by Michael Desnoyers), presented by San Francisco Performances, performing What Is Your Hand in This?, a program (to paraphrase the program notes) celebrating the tradition of dissent in American music, particularly as expressed through questioning this country's treatment of Blacks, from enslavement to Jim Crow apartheid to on-going racist attacks. So the program is a counter-narrative to the more jingoistic (& much more limited & historically blinkered, not to say blind) current celebrations of the founding 250 years ago of the USA. That the irony of the land of liberty holding (certain types of) humans as slaves has long been noted, even before the colonies broke away to form the United States (Samuel Johnson in 1775: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") does not make it less urgent to keep pointing out this irony; it seems in fact more pressing than ever, given our corrupt government's attempts to ignore long-time American realities. I had been looking forward to this concert. But what I experienced Saturday struck me as a mixed bag, & left me disappointed.

To start with more positive notes: Ruckus combines modern electric & early instruments, & I liked their free-wheeling approach to baroque music, which highlighted its connections with what is often called Roots music; they can switch easily from Handel to eighteenth-century hymns to Julius Eastman. Tines is always a commanding performer; he was elegantly dressed in a subtly mismatched suit of reddish brown, with a double-breasted jacket (with a very understated pattern of stripes formed by bouclé lozenges; not sure I'm describing this correctly, but the effect was very fine) worn in place of a shirt. He has an extremely expressive voice, & if there were a few rough patches, they passed quickly (he did seem to drink a lot of water during a performance that lasted only a little over one intermissionless hour, with no encore, despite enthusiastic applause; & a cold seemed to be afflicting members of Ruckus: one violinist in particular dropped a few tissues & had to cough into his sleeve a few times). The young chorus sang admirably.

The material was insightfully chosen, & I was delighted to attend a program that was entirely in English, allowing me to set aside (except for one or two brief moments) the printed words. The opening number, Stephen Foster's Beautiful Dreamer, was a particularly astute choice, nodding to the long-standing minstrel tradition exemplified by many of Foster's songs as well as to the dreamers of the beautiful dream of liberty & equality for all that floats, tantalizingly out of reach, over the American project. Tines sold the pretty & somewhat sentimental Victorian ornateness with smoothness & convincing conviction. Another superb choice, for me perhaps the highlight of the concert, was Handel's setting from Messiah of Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage Together? It was a choice open to multiple interpretations, & I loved the way Tines & Ruckus stretched & played with the lines, varying from baroque ornaments to modern vocal techniques, devolving into emotionally convincing sonic ruptures that caught the never-ending historical cycles of the nations dissolving, changing, & continuing to rage furiously.

So what went wrong, at least for me? To start with, the performers were all amplified. That amplification is an increasingly common & even unquestioned occurrence doesn't make it any better as an experience. Herbst is a small enough theater so that I always have to wonder why amplification is necessary: if your voice or your playing can't fill that space, you probably shouldn't be performing professionally, & if you're drowning out (or drowned by) other performers, you as a group need to work on balances. Ruckus did have some electric instruments, but I've heard those incorporated into ensembles without the need to jack up everyone & everything else (& if that can't happen, maybe just drop the electric instruments?)

Amplification flattens the sound & removes its spatial sense, distortions which, even when or if they're subtle, undercut the experience of live music, those elements of the chance & the human. I sit in the first row for my SF Performances concerts, & usually there's an immediacy & intimacy that comes from such proximity that makes it worth the trouble & expense of buying a ticket & going out, rather than just staying in & listening to a recording. On Saturday I felt the electronic pulpit raised above my head, the music & the words talking down to me.

But I've been to other amplified concerts at Herbst, & generally I can adjust. On Saturday, though, there was also a lot of the sort of obligatory audience participation that I – I'll go with dislike. After his opening song, Tines said Good evening & paused, then repeated a bit more firmly Good evening. Evidently we were supposed to respond, as if at a party. Enough did so that he gave a little smile & said he just wanted to see if we were alive. Is enforced participation genuine participation? Intent, silent listening is, I would think, all the sign of life a performer can really want (& more than many of them get). We were told, at times, to clap in rhythm. We were told to sing a chorus, then to sing it again. We were told to raise our hands if we thought we were living in – I think he said odd times? whatever the exact term, it struck me as a bit cutesy & entirely inadequate to the perilous times burning around us. It's been about a decade since the corruptions of American culture suppurated into our current President; did Tines think we hadn't noticed? that we weren't distressed? that we had never expressed our complicated feelings before we were asked to raise our hands? Why do performers so frequently use these coy evasions ("these days", "our times") instead of directly naming the fascist Republican Party? What was the point of making us literally raise our hands, as if most of us aren't thinking night & day about the rotten state of things? What does it accomplish if we raise our hands? We then just put them back down, & continue doing what we were doing before.

The clapping, the singing, the hand-raising: maybe that sort of group activity works more effectively on other people than on me. (I'm not implying that this makes me superior in any way; it may well be a drawback of mine). I do not identify with groups, maybe in particular with other members of an audience. (This audience was actually better than many, but as usual, a woman sitting near me created dazzling amounts of noise shuffling her program during the performance, & a trio of annoying children not only rustled & whispered during the show, they got up, walked out, & then returned disruptively.)

I'd say I have an instinctive aversion to this sort of forced audience participation, but on Saturday I realized that maybe it is learned, as the on-going instructions from stage flashed me back to school days, particularly to the cheerful coercion of post-1968 high-school civics teachers, expecting us, as students & therefore idealists, to produce the correct, high-minded answers to whatever social question was posed. And I basically agree with all those high-minded liberal pieties. But I couldn't help noticing, as a student, that many of my fellow students who were readiest to produce the acceptable answers (the loudest yelps for liberty. . . ) were the same ones who, an hour later during lunch or recess, were going to continue to ridicule & pick on me. I was given frequent reminders of the disjunction between what people feel they need to say to please their teachers & how they actually treat others when the teachers are away. The appropriate & bien-pensant & regurgitated replies seldom connected with anyone's actual actions.

I felt that again on Saturday, the sense that we are there to hear information & to react in a certain way as if we'd never heard it all before, repeatedly, & that this is all sort of a ceremony that we go through that is set apart from what we mostly do in our lives. Tines introduced some songs with a bit of a lecture about the conditions of slaves & slave-owners (as a side note, I was mildly surprised he said "slaves" rather than the more nuanced & nowadays more frequently encountered term "enslaved people"). Of course we've all heard this before. It doesn't get less horrifying, & the ironies don't lessen. As I said at the beginning of this post, these things still need to be said. Repetition is emphasis, & some things need to be emphasized. Are the people who need to hear these reminders, though, the ones who go to art-song recitals in San Francisco?

As a thoughtful & sensitive Black artist, Tines is almost obliged to say these things. And we, as an audience (mixed, but mostly white) attempting to be thoughtful & sensitive, are almost obliged (&, let me add, also often sincerely willing to) react in a certain way. But it all ends up feeling a bit . . . comme il faut? ceremonial? ritualistic? a Dantean whirlwind we can never escape? a Beckett scene of rote statements & standard responses that will play out endlessly in an unchanging landscape? What was new here? (Did anything need to be new here?) Was I just put off by the amplification, & the silly attempts to get the audience "involved" in a way other than by paying attention? Was I just having an off day for some unrelated reason? Had my anticipation been high enough so that disappointment was inevitable?

Another highlight was the song that provided the program's title: What Is My Hand in This? Tines wrote the lyrics, & before the performance started I had read the program note (the notes in general were attributed to Tines & Ruckus) on this song:

"The idea for the song 'What is My Hand in This' came from an invitation to be part of the entertainment at a Christmas party in one of New York City's wealthiest neighborhoods. Davóne took this as an opportunity not to entertain, but to speak directly and imploringly to a room of the 1% with the subtext 'You in this room have the power to affect great change, so what is your hand in contributing?'. The tune borrows from Black American folk tradition." 

With that context in mind, I was surprised at how effective the song was. Because while it was bold of Tines to add this questioning number to his Christmas program, it was perhaps part of the effect, to be expected, if you are the sort of extremely wealthy person who can hire professional singers for your holiday parties, & you choose to hire a Black singer celebrated for his unconventional, thoughtful & often politically conscious choices, that he is going to bring some of the fire next time directly to your hearth. After all, a reminder no matter how subtle that you should, as they say, check your privilege is a reminder that not only are you, compared to most, incredibly privileged, you might even be the gold standard for privilege. I thought the song might land a little differently at a public concert of miscellaneous schlubs, some of whom had made a financial sacrifice to buy a ticket.

So, as I said, I was surprised at how effective the song turned out to be. In its simple, direct words, it asks us to consider, as we go about our business, what part we play in what's going on around us: what is our responsibility, or our role, or our connection? Questions, not answers, about our individual share in our collective existence. Unlike the clapping in rhythm, the singing along, & other mandatory fun-type activities imposed on us, the audience, as an undifferentiated group, this song asked us to examine, as individuals – the only way in which such questions can be seriously considered, as the answers will be different, often profoundly different, for each of us – how we are linked to our world & our times, & what can we do about it. I think about this topic a lot, & have come up with little in the way of a satisfactory response. Perhaps there is no satisfactory response, & the continuing questioning is the best we can do (or is that just another excuse?)

Was that the sort of direct, individual, thought-provoking moment I needed more of? Was I just a bit burnt out by the burning dumpster fire of our moment? Did the gimmicky participation stuff & the distancing amplification undercut the good moments too much for me? My reaction to this concert bothered me. I feel I should have liked it more, if only out of solidarity & respect with what the artists were trying to do. Did it just hit me at a certain point of information overload? I have struggled with finding & expressing the sources of my disappointment. I can't say Saturday's concert, despite my anticipation, really brought anything new to my thoughts or feelings. I emerged neither energized nor inspired, but exhausted & (more) depressed.  The fault may, of course, be mine.