Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s music was a largely private practice for most of her life, her weightless, spiritually guided compositions being shared minimally while she lived quietly as a nun. She is generally known as Emahoy, a religious honorific. Born in 1923 as Yewubdar Gebru to a wealthy Amhara family in Addis Ababa, in 1929 Emahoy was sent with her sister, Senedu Gebru, to a boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where she studied both piano and the violin. They were the first Ethiopian girls to receive education overseas. In 1933, Emahoy returned to Ethiopia. During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–37), Emahoy and her family were prisoners of war. After the war, Emahoy studied in Cairo under the Polish Jewish violinist, Alexander Kontorowicz. She returned to Addis Ababa, accompanied by Kontorowicz who was appointed head of the Imperial Guard band by Emperor Haile Selassie; Emahoy often performed with Kontorowicz before the emperor. However, she was denied permission to attend the Royal Academy of Music by senior court officials, who opposed her leaving Addis Ababa. Emahoy secretly fled Addis Ababa at the age of 24 to enter the Gishen Mariam monastery, where after two years service she was ordained a nun. She took on the title Emahoy, and her name was changed to Tsege Mariam. With no piano at Gishen, Emahoy would travel back and forth between the monastery and Addis Ababa, playing the piano at her family’s home until late at night. She went on to write many compositions for the piano, organ and her own voice. With the help of Selassie, Emahoy’s first albums were released in Germany in 1963, followed by another two in 1972, one of them to raise money for the Ethiopian church in Jerusalem. She eventually fled to that city in 1984, following her mother’s death, as the socialist government brought to power by the Derg party coup in 1974 heavily restricted all music-making and religious activity. During that time, Emahoy was unable to release any of her music, and her work was largely forgotten. In 2006, after she settled in Jerusalem, Emahoy’s music again reached a wider audience, when Éthiopiques Volume 21: Ethiopia Song, a compilation of her songs, was released to huge success. Two years later, she made a rare appearance in the US, performing at the Jewish Community Center in Washington, DC to benefit the newly-founded Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation. Mississippi Records started releasing Emahoy’s archival recordings in 2016 with a self-titled compilation, and the label shared more of her albums over the next several years, among them 2024’s Souvenirs. Emahoy died in 2023 at the age of 99.