The late Mexico City composer’s recordings move like Autechre and Aphex Twin tracks. Before MIDI or the 808, before Ableton, before the first home computers, an Arkansas-born, Mexico […]
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: Church of Kidane Mehret
Emahoy’s treasured 1972 private press album is available now via Mississippi Records.
The captivating musical legacy of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou continues to unfold. Mississippi Records’ release of Church of Kidane Mehret includes all of Emahoy’s compositions from her 1972 private press album of the same name, as well as two piano pieces from her nearly lost 1963 album Der Sang des Meeres (Song of the Sea). Emahoy passed away in 2023 at nearly one hundred years old. Her available discography comprises a fraction of her compositional career, and while Ethiopiques, Vol. 21 introduced her music to international audiences, subsequent reissues by Mississippi Records and the efforts of an emerging generation of performers and scholars are revealing new facets of Emahoy’s unparalleled life and work.
“Listening to one of her works can be disconcerting,” writes Kalkidan Yibeltal, “It sometimes feels like being tossed around in a small boat at sea, constantly off balance, with little to hold on to.” Journalist and creator of the radio documentary The Honky Tonk Nun, Kate Molleson, echoes these sentiments, “With Emahoy, nothing is regular… Her melodies flit between traditions; they float on their own axis.”
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Emahoy is sometimes grouped with the Ethio-jazz movement, but she insisted that what she did was not jazz. Her training was in Western classical music, and much of her inspiration was from Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. Also, her earliest recordings appear nealy a decade before Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz defining album, Mulatu Of Ethiopia. Ultimately, Emahoy is a singular voice whose pioneering sound, as Yibeltal says, “reflected the way her life oscillated between parallel worlds.”
Emahoy was born into an aristocratic family in Addis Ababa in the early 1920s. In her life, she was the first to do many things, including becoming one of the first Ethiopian children to study abroad. She and her sister, Senedu, received their early education in a Swiss boarding school. Here, Emahoy was exposed to Western classical music and began her studies in violin and piano. She also said of this time, “Loneliness grew up with me like a childhood friend.”
She returned to Ethiopia at age 11, just before Mussolini’s invasion. This was a brutal and traumatic time. Three of Emahoy’s family members were killed, and she and the rest of her family were interned in a prisoner-of-war camp on the island of Asinara. As the Italian occupation finally came to an end, Emahoy returned to Ethiopia. However, she would soon move to British-occupied Cairo to study music with the Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz. For unclear reasons, Emahoy was unable to accept a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. This was a devastating disappointment for her, and by age 21, she relocated to Amba Gishen, a mountain monastery in Ethiopia’s Wollo province, where she was ordained as a nun.
She would spend the following ten years living barefoot in monastic isolation. Following the death of Bishop Mikael, Emahoy briefly returned to Addis Ababa and then moved to nearby Gondar, where she slowly resumed her musical life. However, as Kate Molleson notes, “Now it was her own compositions where the virtuosity of an international pianist came together with the profound meditations of a barefoot nun.”
One of the things that is so compelling about Emahoy’s work is what the scholar Thomas Feng describes as the “punk quality” of her DIY approach. She was initially inspired to record her music after encountering the poverty of the mendicant liturgical students in Gondar. Wanting to raise funds to alleviate their suffering, in 1963, she traveled to Germany to record her first two albums, Spielt Eigene Kompositionen (Plays Her Own Compositions) and Der Sang des Meeres (The Song of the Sea). Emperor Haile Selassie himself sponsored the first record, and her sister Desta’s husband, Kebbede Gebre, sponsored the second. The eleven tracks that comprise these two albums reflect roughly a decade and a half of her compositional output up to that point.
Because of restrictions facing Ethiopia’s music industry at the time, Emahoy had to travel abroad to achieve her vision. Through state radio broadcasts in the 1970s, “The Homeless Wanderer,” the first song on Spielt Eigene Kompositionen, would become intimately familiar to Ethiopians. After the release of Ethiopiques, Vol. 21, in 2006, it would also become her most recognizable composition internationally. However, given the circumstances, the fact that these records were made at all is extraordinary. According to Emahoy, Spielt Eigene Kompositionen had a run of 500 copies and Der Sang des Meeres a mere 50. “One of the only known copies was saved from the trash and shared with Mississippi [Records] by a fellow nun at Emahoy’s monastery… in March of 2023.”
With the release of Church of Kidane Mehret, two of the compositions from Der Sang des Meeres, “Essay on Mahlet, the Prayer of Saint Yared” and “The Storm,” are being made available for the first time since 1963. From her earliest recording, Emahoy expressed a dynamic musical vision. “The Storm” is an eerie, expressive, and virtuosic force evocative of the title. “Essay on Mahlet, the Prayer of Saint Yared” is a work of striking beauty, at once melancholic and transcendent. It came out of her time in Gondar, and as Feng notes, it is one of the “earliest surviving pieces in Emahoy’s output featuring explicitly religious content, and the only pieces for which Emahoy acknowledged directly incorporating chant melodies.”
All other tracks on Church of Kidane Mehret are from Emahoy’s titular 1972 album. While explicitly devotional, these recordings also reveal another facet of Emahoy’s DIY approach. Prior to this record, Emahoy acquired recording equipment and started recording herself, becoming her own producer and engineer. According to Feng, “Her tapes show that she became quite fluent with the recording process, recording and labeling multiple takes, selecting different tape speeds and mono/stereo dispositions, and adjusting mic placement… Instead of recording in the studio for her fourth record in 1972, she appears to have recorded the entire album herself on consumer-grade home recording equipment.”
Freed from the traditional recording studio, the first composition on Church of Kidane Mehret finds Emahoy in a familiar place, behind a piano, though the chapel acoustics on “Ave Maria” heighten the music’s dreamlike quality. The other tracks recorded in churches across Jerusalem are more instrumentally diverse. She plays harmonium on the lush and hypnotic “Spring Ode – Meskerem,” and “Via Dolorosa, XIth Station of the Cross,” and “Prayer for Peace. Ps. 122 (Kyrie Eleison),” on the B-side of the album, feature the glittering grandeur of a massive pipe organ.
In the sleeve notes of the original pressing, it reads, “performed by herself as a contribution to the welfare of the Church.” Like her 1963 records, Church of Kidane Mehret is both an act of service and an uncompromising artistic vision. Though informed by Western classical and Ethiopian Orthodox music, she pushes against the boundaries of both traditions. Molleson and others have argued that “Emahoy should be included alongside more familiar names when considering great 20th-century composers.” Although notoriety was never her ambition, with each rerelease and new realization of her work, her place in the pantheon of musical luminaries becomes increasingly undeniable.
Teo Blake Beauchamp is a writer, professor, and musician from Los Angeles, CA. Beauchamp received his MFA in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College in 2020. He teaches a variety of classes in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and Montclair State. He is also a staff writer at Pop Matters and a contributor to American Music Review and In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi.
