Before the coup, the evening air over Addis Ababa was rich with sound: the pentatonic scales of traditional Ethiopian music, the chromatic scales of Western jazz, the bodied grooves of American soul and funk. It features only the pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (“Emahoy,” by which she is generally known, is a religious honorific), and includes material drawn from charity albums. Emahoy’s music can be difficult for critics to categorize. She continued to study music, now with the Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz, in Cairo, practicing the violin for four hours a day and the piano for five. In the sixties, she started an intense study of St. Yared, a sixth-century Aksumite composer credited with developing liturgical music for the Ethiopian Orthodox church.

Source: Ethiopian News April 07, 2023 14:38 UTC