Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s transcendent music is inextricably connected to resistance. The Addis Ababa-born nun, composer, and musician crafted her exquisite oeuvre as a way to give back to her community: The money she made from charity albums and concerts went to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, orphanages, and others who were displaced and devastated by war in her home country and abroad.
Emahoy’s music is an alchemical blend of styles, incorporating fluttering piano, violin, and organ melodies informed by Ethiopian liturgical tradition, European classical music, and her own melismatic, circular melodies that give and bend at will. She began writing music in the 1940s and continued composing until her death last March, just before her 100th birthday, amid a renewed swell of interest in her work; even corporate overlords like Amazon and Walmart have synced her music in commercials. On the new posthumous album Souvenirs, released in collaboration by Emahoy’s family and Portland record label Mississippi with assistance from historian Thomas Feng, the artist’s astonishing compositions—filled out for the first time with vocals performed by Emahoy herself—strike the soul. Sung in Amharic and taped on cassette in her family’s home in Addis Ababa during a period of political unrest, these wending, inquisitive songs are a nourishing balm and an essential expansion of her available catalog.
Recorded between 1977 and 1985, Souvenirs captures a shift in Emahoy’s songwriting that coincided with a turning point in her life. She and her family were restricted from leaving Ethiopia during the Red Terror, a campaign of repression that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie by the Derg regime, a Marxist-Leninist military junta, in 1974. Emahoy had endured war since she was a child, having been born into a wealthy Ethiopian family who were exiled and became prisoners of war following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Even before the invasion, music had coursed through her life as a twin flame. At age 6, she was sent to a Swiss boarding school where she studied violin and piano before returning to Ethiopia. After the war, she traveled to Cairo to study under Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz, honing her skill at rehearsals that could last as long as four hours. She was ordained as a nun in 1948 and spent the next decade at the Gishen Mariam monastery in northern Ethiopia, occasionally returning to see her family in Addis Ababa. In the 1960s she returned to the city and continued to write for piano, organ, and violin. Her first albums, Spielt Eigene Kompositionen and Der Sang des Meeres, were recorded in Germany in 1963 as charity releases benefitting liturgical students in the city of Gondar, where she had relocated. The fruitful run of music, which included timeless songs like “Homesickness” and “The Homeless Wanderer,” became some of her best-known.
By the early 1970s, Emahoy was in her mid-50s and living in Jerusalem, finding deeper inspiration for her music within the holy city and releasing two more albums dedicated to the Ethiopian Orthodox church and an orphanage. Upon returning to her mother in Ethiopia, her musical practice diversified—she dedicated songs to family members, wrote hymns, and performed benefit concerts, broadening her music’s personal and cultural purpose up until the Derg took power. Under this new form of exile, Emahoy crafted Souvenirs. The liner notes observe that this music was likely meant to be private at the time it was made; Emahoy often recorded songs late into the night since the Derg had restricted access to evening liturgy services at the church, and these lightly scuffed reel-to-reel recordings capture errant sounds like birdsong outside of her window, adding a wistful, homespun richness.
Throughout, Emahoy’s songwriting orients toward melancholic, tremulous compositions and lyrics that evoke the natural world as a means of escape. Opener “Clouds Moving on the Sky” yearns for a safe haven, drifting on Emahoy’s melismatic runs that climb, elongate, and shift in tandem with her piano like sunlight passing over grass. “My heart has never stopped missing home,” she sings mournfully, going on to give voice to anyone displaced by war: “Why are we condemned to be tangled in the sins of others?” Her voice arcs around notes, capable of both gliding exuberance and weary contemplation. Over rippling piano arrangements on the stunning “Ready to Leave” and “Is It Sunny or Cloudy in the Land You Live?,” she dreams of travel, but her thoughts never stray far: “I couldn’t see my country’s sky,” she sings in the latter song, her voice rising to an epiphanic high. “Have I really gone so far?”
The music of Souvenirs underlines Emahoy’s pride in the beauty and breadth of life in Ethiopia; here, you easily understand her drive to keep coming home. The highlight “Ethiopia My Motherland” dances along a roaming piano melody as she paints a vivid, loving portrait, describing fields “rolling in green velvet” and trees “draped in yellow and red.” She extends her love to the soldiers, laborers, farmers, and everyone else who make up her homeland: “Could a country be missed like a person?” she asks tenderly. She continues to weave a political thread through the warm, eddying “Don’t Forget Your Country,” which references the Derg regime’s effort to eradicate illiteracy. “Our nation’s literacy campaign made history/When the young, the elderly, and men walk together/It is a great pride for the comrade who taught them,” she sings, affirming the spread of knowledge. The song speaks to Emahoy’s ethos throughout her life: ensuring the safety, wellbeing, and benefit of those within her power to help.
In 1984, Emahoy was able to secure her return to Jerusalem, where she took a vow of poverty and remained at the Debre Genet Monastery for the rest of her life. Souvenirs was recovered from Emahoy’s cell at the monastery among other boxes of cassette tapes. It’s miraculous that the album exists in the state it does—a crucial new inclusion to Emahoy’s catalog that expands on the artistry, fluidity, and beauty of her craft. You can hear it best on “Where Is the Highway of Thought?,” where a recursive piano melody guides a lulling meditation on mortality. Here, she considers that thoughts, unbound by a tangible form, can “make your flesh jealous,” but she finds some peace within the idea. “Thought, who are you?/You never get tired,” she sings, “No matter how far you travel/You never run out of ways.” With Souvenirs, Emahoy’s extraordinary life and music is certain to continue traveling in the same ceaseless manner, transforming countless lives along its path.
