By Gabriel Mullins, BA History
On the 26th March 2023, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru (ጽጌ ማርያም ገብሩ, sometimes romanised as ‘Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’) died at the age of 99 in Jerusalem. The Ethiopian Orthodox nun’s first posthumous album, Souvenirs, will be released this month, the result of years of collaboration between researchers and engineers at Mississippi Records and the composer herself, to bring to life sessions recorded from 1977-1985.
Pages of Emahoy’s Amharic poetry.
“Her life tells a remarkable and sometimes cloudy story set between Ethiopia and Jerusalem, which grants the listener a window into the context that pervades her music.”
Emahoy is probably best known in the West for the 2006 album Ethiopiques vol. 21, a compilation of her solo piano recordings. Her life tells a remarkable and sometimes cloudy story set between Ethiopia and Jerusalem, which grants the listener a window into the context that pervades her music. Emahoy was born in Addis Ababa in 1923 as Yewubdar Gebru, the daughter of the Ethiopian national-historical figure Kentiba Gebru Desta. Her family was heavily involved in politics and civil society, undergoing wartime imprisonment by the Italian fascist regime. After the war, the Swiss-educated Yewubdar took up intensive music tuition in Cairo. She has mentioned an old ‘Polish master’ with whom she would study piano, whose name she had forgotten but whose teaching remained with her.
A piece of Emahoy’s art.
Upon her return to Addis Ababa, she was awarded a scholarship to embark on a course of study at the RAM in London, but, arbitrarily, the Ethiopian government denied her permission to travel. This threw her into a deep depression, the recovery from which left her with a newfound sense of peace and religious attachment. She eventually absconded to Gishen Maryam monastery. At age 24 she gave up her name, becoming Emahoy (an honorific equivalent in some ways to ‘sister’) Tsege-Mariam. She remained there for ten years, where her relationship with music became deeply linked to her faith.
Souvenirs album cover.
Credit: Mississippi Records
Leaving her monastery, Emahoy returned to work in the capital and released her first record in 1967 with the help of Haile Selassie. Continuing to compose, the turmoil of the 1974 revolution affected her profoundly – as both an Orthodox nun and associated with Imperial Ethiopia, she was not a natural friend of the Derg regime. In 1984 she left the country and sought refuge with the Ethiopian Orthodox church in Jerusalem. She remained in her new monastery, Debre Genet, composing and recording for the piano, organ, and chamber orchestra and working for the church until her death last March. She would have been 100 on the 12th of December.
Mississippi Records has been working with doctoral student Thomas Feng to publish Souvenirs in collaboration with the Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Music Publisher and its attached nonprofit. Feng is a musician and scholar at Cornell completing a dissertation on Emahoy’s life and music. In much commentary published in the West, Emahoy’s music is situated outside the musical canon. It’s described as genreless and ‘otherworldly’ (The New Yorker), ” or misattributed as belonging to jazz, blues, or ‘honky-tonk’ (Radio 4). In an interview with Mississippi Records, Feng explained that he intends to write about her as a musical-historical figure, historicising her amongst the classical composers alongside whom she is usually only mentioned in passing.
Emahoy’s classical training was extensive; her music draws from classical European forms and blends them with an ancient Ethiopian folk and liturgical musical tradition. Whilst her ‘othering’ from the Western musical canon recognises the singular nature of her work, it also excludes her from being subject to classical study, her inclusion in which, Feng submits, will grant Emahoy’s music the broader theoretical influence it deserves.
Prior to Mississippi Records’ upcoming release, the contents of Souvenirs were only available on an eponymous CD compilation produced by Emahoy in a very limited run for the Debre Genet Monastery’s gift shop. Feng relates the name to an idiom – the idea in Ethiopian verse of ‘wax and gold’. Analogous to a goldsmith first creating a wax mould around a clay model, before casting a golden object out of it, the ‘wax’ in a passage symbolises the overt meaning, whilst the ‘gold’ is the subtext uncovered by a different reading. In translation from Amharic, the precise meaning of many of the album’s lyrics was left obscure without written context clues. Far from unfortunate, this dynamic preserves the transcendental qualities of Emahoy’s compositions. Feng figures that the name Souvenirs was also given a double meaning – one for Emahoy, for whom the songs recall the turbulence of the 70s and the Derg regime, and another for the visitors to the gift shop who, having bought her collection, hope it will remind them of the Monastery when they listen to it at home.
Souvenirs is out on the 23rd of February. Pre-orders can be made online, at Mississippi Records. Much of this article was based on conversations, writings, and research on and with Emahoy Tsege-Mariam, conducted by Thomas Feng and Maia Dunitz, and published on www.emahoymusicpublisher.com and elsewhere.
All images sourced from Emahoy Music Publisher