Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou - 1963 - Spielt Eigene Kompositionen

Tsege Mariam Gebru

1963

Spielt Eigene Kompositionen

01. Der Heimatlose Wanderer

02. Die Letzte Träne Eines Toten

03. Klage Eines Jungen Mädchens

04. Das Verrückte Lachen

05. Ahnung

Composed and Performed by Tsege Mariam Gebru

Born to an aristocratic family in Addis Ababa in December of 1923, Emahoy spent much of her youth and young adulthood studying classical music in Europe. She returned to Ethiopia in the 40s, where the war interrupted her musical studies. In 1948 during a church service in Ethiopia, she found her faith and began years of religious training.

Throughout her physical and spiritual journeys, Emahoy continued to compose for the piano. She first released this album in Germany 1963 as small private press record. The tracks reflect her own travels, seamlessly moving between Western classical and traditional Ethiopian modes, evoking Erik Satie, the orthodox liturgy, and meditative Christian music all at once. Her work is like no one else in the world, lyrical, hypnotic, full of spiritual warmth and a direct connection to the divine.

Emahoy lived in Jerusalem for many years where she continued to play until she passed in 2023, the funds from her work go to the righteous causes to which she has dedicated her life

This record, made when she travelled to Germany in 1963, marked the first time Emahoy’s music was recorded and features 5 compositions that beautifully weave through blues, jazz, and classical solo piano works. The transformative recordings of “Kompositionen” reflect Emahoy’s deeply expressive style of piano playing and her lifetime of experiences as a young music student in 1920’s Switzerland, her time spent as a Prisoner of War in WWII, her years as a close confidant of Emperor Haile Selassie, and her later years as a Nun in Jerusalem.

A profoundly healing and contemplative record, “Spielt Eigene Kompositionen” is the perfect soundtrack to reflect on memories of the past, while ushering in the hopes of a better future. Here is what each song meant to her as she was composing:

The Homeless Wanderer

The homeless wanderer plays his flute while he worries about the wilderness around him where he journeys. At night in the mountains, when people and animals rest after the day, one hears the song of a flute which the little wanderer plays, alone and far from home. The wild animals and snakes do not dare approach him, but listen spellbound to the melody his flute produces. The power of the notes protects him. Thus he loses his fear of the nocturnal visitors and they become his friends.

The Last Tears of a Deceased

Dedicated to my beloved brother, Assayehegne, who died in a car accident at the age of 18. The last sentence of my composition expresses my deep sorrow: “my heart will weep for him all my life.”

A Young Girl’s Complaint

A young girl complains about the hardships of life. Her sister’s words give her no comfort. But her tears bring relief from her sorrow.

The Mad Man’s Laughter

This designation for my composition goes back to a remark my sister made, which is that when she heard it, she heard the reverberating sounds of a madman's laughter.

Presentiment

The presentiment of a heavy stroke of fate. Composed two years before the death of my youngest brother, Assayehegn.

The music of the pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou seemed to reflect every area of her extraordinary life. A daughter of Addis Ababa’s upper classes, she was immersed in Ethiopian traditional song, then trained in classical violin and piano, embraced early jazz and later took holy orders. So it’s quite fitting that her compositions were a curious fusion of fin de siècle parlour piano, gospel, ragtime, Ethiopian folk music and the choral traditions of the country’s Orthodox church. A BBC radio documentary on her work was entitled The Honky Tonk Nun, and it seemed to sum up the paradoxical nature of her music – a mix of high and low art, sacred and profane, precise notation and free improvisation.

Emahoy might have remained unknown to the outside world were it not for the French musicologist Francis Falceto, who worked with the record label Buda Music to release an album of her archive recordings in 2006. It was part of a series of compilation albums of Ethiopian music entitled Éthiopiques. The series was a revelation, even to many people who thought they were familiar with Africa’s best music. Where there are certain instruments, rhythms, scales and voicings that are shared by several different regions around the continent, the music of Ethiopia – one of the world’s oldest Christian civilisations – stands distinct and discrete from anything in neighbouring countries.

Emahoy’s best-known contemporaries and compatriots, who also featured on the Éthiopiques series, were jazz and funk musicians such as Mulatu Astatke, Hailu Mergia and Mahmoud Ahmed, whose mix of shuffling, disjointed rhythms, seductive vocals and sizzling wah-wah guitar riffs remain a source of fascination. But Emahoy’s spartan solo piano recordings didn’t quite fit under the ambit of jazz. Compositions such as The Homeless Wanderer, Homesickness and Mother’s Love (several of which are now familiar from TV advertisements) were quizzical, stately, delightfully odd pieces pitched somewhere between Keith Jarrett, Erik Satie, Scott Joplin and Professor Longhair.

They use a series of pentatonic scales, or kignits, which are the building blocks of all Ethiopian music, from its ancient liturgical chants to its folk songs and funky pop music. These five-note scales are similar but musicologically quite distinct from Arabic maqams or Indian modes. They have names like the anchihoye, the tizita and the bati, and most have major and minor-key variations (some, like the ambassel, don’t have a minor or major third at all, and so have a wonderfully ambiguous, open-ended feel). Emahoy’s piano playing manipulated these modes to draw us in and hypnotise us, like a snake charmer with a pungi.

Her signature style on the piano was metrical and precise. All improvising pianists try to “bend” notes in some way, but Emahoy had a very distinctive way of doing it. She didn’t slur or slide or crunch the keys like a blues or boogie-woogie pianist might, but instead played very crisp trills that gave the impression of raising and lowering the pitch of a note, just like the florid curlicues that Bach might have precisely notated. Her music often didn’t obey strict tempo considerations, slowing down and then speeding up almost at random. Sometimes she’d use so much rubato that a song that started in waltz-time would end in 4/4.

This music was the product of an extraordinary backstory. Her father, the European-educated diplomat and mayor of Gondar, Kentiba Gebru Desta, was 78 years old when she was born, making her possibly the only person on the planet alive in 2023 with a parent born in 1845. The young Emahoy was a glamorous society girl, educated at a Swiss boarding school and fluent in several languages. She had piano and violin lessons at a classical conservatoire in Cairo (learning under the Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz), immersing herself in the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann. On her return to Addis Ababa, she started to write her own compositions, and assisted Kontorowicz when he led the Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard Band (she recalls playing the Emperor some solo piano pieces and singing him a ballad in Italian).

In 1948, she was offered a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London but didn’t take up the offer, instead surprising her peers by taking holy orders and living – barefoot – in a convent outside Addis Ababa. By the early 1960s she started playing the piano again, and her recordings between 1963 and the mid-70s have become the basis for her canon. In 1984, she relocated to an Ethiopian Orthodox convent in Jerusalem. Until recently she was, from all accounts, still practising every day on an upright piano in her convent, and writing new material. Maybe some of these songs will yet emerge, as singular as the rest.