Chants, Agency, and Melodies: Baritone Davon Tynes talks about rewriting his role—and the rules classical music

IIn performance, Davóne Tines is sensational. In the first concert of the American bass-baritone’s 2025-2026 residency at London’s Barbican Centre, he appeared at the back of the hall and then slowly descended towards the stage, floodlit and subtly lifted. His unaccompanied voice broke into Stentorian spikes, the spitting of consonants, and the violent crackling of mouth sounds. This is clearly the musician who The New Yorker declared in 2021 was “changing what it means to be a classical singer.”

Since then, Tynes has been named Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year and has won the 2024 Chanel Next Award for “global contemporary artists redefining their disciplines.” He received the 2025 Harvard Arts Medal for distinguished alumni from an Ivy League university who have demonstrated achievement in the arts. Recent winners of the latter include architect Frank Gehry and novelist Margaret Atwood. Unlike these cultural figures, Taines is not yet forty years old.

Other singers win major awards, of course, and others explore the artistic and aesthetic boundaries of what is traditionally known as “singing.” But few in classical music are openly determined to diversify freely across genres and professional activities—or are fully aware of their own abilities. Video calls are punctuated by long periods of silence as Tynes formulates the answers provided into long paragraphs, often offering densely argued theories about aspects of classical music. It is rare for an interviewee to use words like “exclusively,” “valence,” and “embodied” as a matter of course, or attempt to explain his feelings about his own performance in terms of a “quadratic function.” Davonne Tynes may have the voice of an opera singer, but he speaks like a philosopher.

We first spoke as Tynes prepares to appear in a double bill of works by Kurt Weill and William Grant Still at Detroit Opera. Taines rose to international fame in the Dutch premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s chamber opera Only the Sound Remains in 2016, and most recently made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the 2024 production of John Adams’s opera El Niño. However, he also performs spiritual and gospel works and is working on a project “For a Wider Ear” with his band “The Truth”. His forays into what he calls “metropolitan opera” are entirely accidental. “For this project [at Detroit Opera] “This is about presenting black American love stories, and I would gladly take back the mental baggage,” he says. What keeps him at a distance the rest of the time? “Many cultural artifacts and practices supported by institutions over time tend to be exclusionary because populations, mostly white and mostly wealthy, have created systems and foundations for disseminating their own views or interests.”

After a few weeks, I return tentatively to the question of the “grand opera.” Tynes has previously said that he would be interested in singing some bass-baritone roles such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni or even Wagner’s Wotan, is that still the case? “I’m open to all of these possibilities. It’s always been context-dependent.” There is a pause. “You know,” he begins, giving up several sentences before musing, “maybe there’s an assumption that I don’t like the operatic canon?” He confirms that this is not the case. The problem is that “its proponents and purveyors do not consistently emphasize its value to humanity as a necessary part of storytelling and social-emotional and cultural cleansing.” What Tynes often misses in opera and classical music is an investigation into why precious works of art remain valuable and what they might say today. He concludes with a knowing cackle that what he doesn’t care about is “being criticized for someone’s production of Don Giovanni. I want to understand this text through a very intentional process of evaluation.”

“Intentionality” appears as a key word in Tynes’s extensive lexicon. When I asked him about programming his current residency at the Barbican, he emphasized that exercising his agency as an artist is not just about what or how he sings. “It says, ‘I have a connection to the larger world and I choose to exist in it in a certain way.’” He identifies two principles on which his artistic process is based: first, the fact that “ road Something no less important was built What It was built.” And secondly? “I really feel like everything is kind of a metaphor for everything else. All ideas are transferable and expandable, and I think that’s why we have art.

Tynes is keen to stress that these large, abstract ideas are largely written into his residency at the Barbican. His first concert focused on the works of Julius Eastman — “a black, gay, triple-threat composer, pianist, and singer,” as Tynes described him elsewhere. Like Eastman, Tynes is black and gay and works outside the traditional boundaries of any one musical profession, describing himself as a “creative and opera singer.” Just as importantly, the performance was a completely collaborative affair, with Tynes participating amidst a host of musicians and dancers, with the program curated by Grammy-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods. In his opening remarks, Tynes told me the concert was about “representing a point of view [and] How it works.

His innovative work Concerto No. 2: Anthem – the centerpiece of his second residency, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra – highlights even more clearly his vision of what he calls “lateral” artistic agency. This piece has been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic for performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022. “What usually happens is the orchestra commissions a composer to make something — and then later in the process I get hired to execute the thing, like a trained monkey,” he told me. He laughs. “I wanted to try a different way of forging a relationship with an institution, so the orchestra asked me, personally as an artist, to create a piece for them.” He notes coldly that singers are not usually given such a role.

In Anthem, Tynes brings together three composers—Michael Schachter, Caroline Shaw, and Tyshawn Suri—and Mahogany L. Brown, poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center, to create a concerto for voice and orchestra that asks “On what do we base our sovereignty?” He issued his collaborators a single sheet of detailed instructions. Inspired by the glamor of the Hollywood ballroom, he wanted “to do something big and shiny – like a magic trick. The magic trick is to turn the star-spangled banner into ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ (the black national anthem of the United States) over the course of three concerto movements.”

The political landscape in the United States has changed dramatically since Anthem premiered in 2022. I wonder what its hopes are for the United States now, on the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding? After all this vague theorizing, Tynes’s answer was shockingly direct: “I hope it becomes a place to practice true empathy. I believe that if we were all better able to recognize and respect the struggles and lives of others, we could create better worlds for ourselves.”

Davóne Tines is at the Barbican, London, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 13 February and performing in Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at St Giles’ Cripplegate, London, on 22 June.