“Honky tonk” and “nun” are phrases not usually seen together, however in 2017, when the BBC broadcast a radio documentary concerning the pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Honky Tonk Nun” was the title of alternative.
It was a testomony to the music she made, each earlier than and after she turned a nun within the Nineteen Forties, music that drew on her classical coaching however appeared to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and different influences. The comparatively few who found it knew that they had discovered their approach to one thing singular.
The musician Norah Jones was one who did, particularly after listening to the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a group of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was a part of a report collection spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.
“This album is among the most stunning issues I’ve ever heard: half Duke Ellington, half modal scales, half the blues, half church music,” Ms. Jones instructed The New York Occasions in 2020. “It resonated in all these methods for me.”
The documentarian Garrett Bradley used Sister Guèbrou’s music within the soundtrack of “Time,” her acclaimed 2020 movie a couple of New Orleans girl’s struggle to get her husband out of jail. Alex Westfall, writing in Pitchfork about that film and its soundtrack, known as the music “the sonic equal to infinity — untethered by standard meter or rhythm, as if Guèbrou’s instrument holds extra keys than it ought to.”
Fana Broadcasting, Ethiopia’s state-run information company, introduced on March 27 that Sister Guèbrou had died in Jerusalem. She was 99. The announcement didn’t specify when she died.
“Hers had been a number of the most extraordinary 99 years ever lived on this earth,” Kate Molleson, who made “The Honky Tonk Nun” and wrote about Sister Guèbrou in her guide “Sound Inside Sound: Radical Composers of the twentieth Century” (2022), mentioned on Twitter.
Sister Guèbrou (the title emahoy is used for a feminine monk) was born Yewubdar Guèbru on Dec. 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. (She modified her title when she turned a nun.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, held a number of titles, together with mayor of Gondar, and her mom, Kassaye Yelemtu, was socially outstanding as properly. At age 6, Sister Guèbrou was despatched to a boarding college in Switzerland. There, she mentioned within the BBC documentary, she noticed a live performance by a blind pianist that made a powerful impression.
“It remained in my thoughts, in my coronary heart,” she mentioned. “After that, I used to be captivated by music.”
She studied violin and piano after which returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to attend the Empress Menen secondary college. After Italy, underneath Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and compelled its emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile, Sister Guèbrou and her household had been deported to the Italian island of Asinara after which had been relocated to Mercogliano, east of Naples.
When the Italian occupation ended and Selassie was restored to energy in 1941, Sister Guèbrou, nonetheless a youngster, accepted a proposal to additional her music research in Cairo, although the Cairo local weather didn’t agree along with her. She finally returned to Ethiopia, working for a time as an assistant within the Ministry of International Affairs.
She had an opportunity to check on the Royal Academy of Music in London and appeared on the way in which to a profession as a live performance pianist, the BBC documentary says, however that prospect fell by way of for causes Sister Guèbrou wouldn’t element. That led her to a non secular reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.
“I took off my sneakers and went barefoot for 10 years,” she instructed Ms. Molleson. “No sneakers, no music, simply prayer.”
She returned to her household and by the Sixties was recording a few of her music; her first album was launched in Germany in 1967, based on the web site of a basis established in her title to advertise music schooling.
She made a number of different information over the subsequent 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the remainder of her life there. Info on her survivors was not accessible.
Sister Guèbrou got here to a lot wider consideration in 2006. The French musicologist and producer Francis Falceto, who had been releasing albums of Ethiopian music from the Fifties, ’60s and ’70s in a collection known as “Éthiopiques” on the Buda Musique label, made a group of her solo items No. 21 in that collection.
“Whereas the sound of this musician’s pensive, repetitive drawing-room études owes one thing to Beethoven, Schumann and Debussy — though they’re studded with little arpeggios particular to Ethiopian music — there’s a dusky, early-blues high quality to a lot of it,” Ben Ratliff wrote in a evaluate in The Occasions. “If you happen to’ve heard some jazz, you possibly can suppose it was written by Mary Lou Williams or Duke Ellington in their very own moments of creating their very own quiet, authentic drawing-room music.”
Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at SOAS College of London with an experience in Ethiopian music, broke down one monitor from the “Éthiopiques” album, the inviting but complicated “The Story of the Wind,” which is lower than three minutes lengthy.
“First, there’s quite a lot of classical method in there, notably within the interaction between the precise and left palms,” she mentioned by e mail. “You would possibly suppose you’re listening to a sonata for these first few seconds as a result of there’s a lot concord between the precise and left hand. However then it turns into instantly clear that she’s improvising, so the style indicators jazz.”
After which there’s the meter of the piece.
“Most Ethiopian music is written in 6/8, which you’ll depend both as duple meter or triple meter (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3),” Dr. Webster-Kogen wrote. “If you happen to attempt to depend, you’ll see that she actually fluctuates between duple and triple pulse. This might be revolutionary coming from any musician, and positive, there are different Ethiopian musicians who do that — now — however the concept they acquired it from a lady who has devoted her life to prayer and charity … anybody can see that that is uncommon.”
