Because the Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou approached the age of 100, followers and music critics from the US to Ethiopia, Israel to Europe have been eagerly rediscovering her work. However the Addis Ababa-born pianist, who has died on the age of 99, has been a supply of fascination to connoisseurs. Particularly after a disc within the iconic Ethiopiques sequence (issued by Buda Musique) was devoted to her work in 2006.

The classically educated musician was related to the jazz style and spent her life in a convent. She’s going to stay in dying as a lot as in life a determine of lovely contradictions. Her legacy as a feminine instrumentalist, a non secular composer of secular music and an ascetic who created work of astounding magnificence requires of followers to hear for nuance.

A monastery in Jerusalem

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre within the Christian quarter of Jerusalem is pretty much as good a spot as any to start to discover that legacy. Enthusiastic followers of Ethiopian music may flip up, having heard a hearsay that there’s an Ethiopian monastery on the roof. The church has been embroiled for many years in a quarrel over land rights. However in all seasons, Ethiopian monks sleep right here in austere pods with shut proximity to historical past and little safety from the weather.

Guèbrou lived this monastic life for many years, having moved to Jerusalem within the Eighties throughout a tough interval of navy dictatorship underneath Mengistu Haile Mariam and by no means returning completely to Ethiopia. She was recognized to proceed to practise the piano in her room within the convent effectively into her 90s.

Whereas musicians spotlighted within the Ethiopiques sequence tour Jerusalem periodically, she was the one one to maneuver there. So, amongst her different legacies, her life story brings the Kebra Negast – the foundational epic literary work of Ethiopian civilisation centred on the switch of the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia – full circle into the advanced geopolitics of the current day.

Who was Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou?

Guèbrou was photographed extensively within the bed room of her Jerusalem convent, the scene of her outstanding fourth act. How she obtained there may be as unbelievable a narrative as any of the twentieth century.

Guèbrou’s life has been effectively catalogued in profiles and documentaries, and by a basis created by her household.

She was born in 1923 to an upper-class household in Addis Ababa, and he or she was educated in western classical music as a younger girl. She is thought specifically for her virtuosity on the piano, however her coaching was wide-ranging, together with experience on the violin.

As Ethiopia underwent a sequence of dramatic political modifications throughout the 1900s, Guèbrou’s rights as an informed girl shifted, too. With the Italian occupation within the Nineteen Thirties, she and her household frolicked in a jail camp.

Beneath the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie, she frolicked as a working musician alongside the Imperial Bodyguard. With the rise of a navy junta that dominated Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991, she departed for Jerusalem. She remained there till the top of her life, a non secular Christian adopted as a determine of reverence among the many music followers of Israel’s 140,000 residents of Ethiopian lineage.

The facility of her music

Guèbrou’s work is often described as extremely syncretic – drawing from all kinds of musical sources – largely non-Ethiopian references from the western and jazz canons. Critics level to her lengthy improvisations and her free adoption of the tonal ranges that the piano can accommodate. Little doubt, her gender and instrument affect this description. Girls in Ethiopia are most frequently singers and dancers, not instrumentalists. In the event that they do play an instrument, it’s the krar, a six-stringed lyre on which they accompany their very own singing.

Then there may be the sound of her piano taking part in. Western devices have been lengthy acquainted to Ethiopia; the Arba Lijjotch, an orchestra of 40 Armenian orphans, made an impression on Selassie in 1924. The emperor took a liking to brass bands and was hardly ever obtained in public with out one. The sound of the brass band merged within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies with the sound of the Azmari, a self-accompanied folk-poet, creating the musical type that’s so effectively captured within the Ethiopiques albums.

Every quantity is devoted to a special musician, reminiscent of singers Mahmoud Ahmed and Asnaqetch Werqu, and quantity 21 is a complete research of Guèbrou’s repertoire. As music critics have famous, her work sounds markedly completely different from the heavy brass of the Seventies scene in Addis Ababa. However that’s typically extra a query of instrumental timbre than tonality. A cautious hear helps to determine shut engagement with a wide range of Ethiopian musical traditions.

Guèbrou recorded over 100 tracks, however footage of public performances is exceedingly uncommon. Most followers will know the picture of her sitting by her piano in non secular garb as she speaks to the journalists who sought her out through the years. Faith, music and good deeds are indistinguishable from each other, as she explains the aim of the charity based in her title:

After I requested God for his will, I made up my mind to publish and use the cash to fund youngsters and younger individuals for his or her schooling.

The monitor Homesickness has no lyrics, so it may be mistaken for an unique composition. However its first measures reveal that it’s none apart from Tezeta, arguably Ethiopia’s most well-known and extensively recorded music.

Guèbrou has began it with the identical ascending pentatonic motive (a musical scale with 5 notes per octave) as a number of of the artists who cowl the music on Ethiopiques Quantity 10: Ethiopian Blues and Ballads. Whereas this explicit model has no lyrics, the homesickness described within the music refers to a misplaced lover and to a misplaced time and, for an emigrant, a misplaced homeland.

The superb contradictions in Guèbrou’s life layer various readings on prime of this loss. They usually pose to the shut listener the chance that this iconic performer of Tezeta – a lady in exile with out romantic entanglements – embodied for Ethiopians an elusive state of whole creative and religious unity.

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