Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: Spielt Eigene Kompositionen [MISSISSIPPI]

Why you'll love it

Mississippi Records' official reissue is licensed from the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Publisher and Foundation. Her quiet, rolling piano pieces, blending Western classical music with Ethiopian modes, have found a new audience in films and trailers.

This edition

• Officially licensed from the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Foundation
• Solo piano recordings

About the album

Few musicians have lived a life quite like hers. Born Yewubdar Gebru in Addis Ababa in 1923, she was sent to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, at six, studying piano and violin, among the first Ethiopian girls educated abroad. She became a nun in 1944, took the name Tsegué-Maryam, and spent the rest of a very long life writing music.

This was her first record, made in Germany in the 1960s with help from Emperor Haile Selassie, and raising money for homeless children was part of the point. It's solo piano, her own compositions: "The Homeless Wanderer" sways and circles like a half-remembered waltz, "The Last Tears Of The Deceased" and "Presentiment" are tender and searching, and "The Mad Man's Laughter" dances. Listeners often hear Erik Satie in it, filtered through Ethiopian scales and church music.

Her music reached the wider world through Ethiopiques Volume 21 in 2006, and "The Homeless Wanderer" turned up in the trailer for Netflix's Passing. She kept composing until she died in Jerusalem in 2023, aged 99; some of us can't keep a houseplant going through February.

Also at Kops: more Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on vinyl · browse World

Tracklist

Listen

On Mississippi Records (cat# MRP-025).