To Gladden the Heart
Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
In 1997, a French record label, Buda Musique, established ‘Éthiopiques’, a series of CDs of songs from Ethiopia’s most successful period of popular music, which began in the late 1960s and lasted until the middle of the next decade, when a military junta ousted the Ethiopian Emperor and put in place a wide range of repressive social policies. The music was abundant and varied, its influences including traditional Ethiopian idioms, Western jazz, and American soul and funk. Unexpectedly, Volume XXI of the series, released in 2006 and featuring the pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru (often spelled ‘Guébrou’), a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, attracted particular attention. Generally known as ‘Emahoy’, a religious honorific, Gebru’s music is a uniquely odd blend of styles, based on Ethiopian liturgical tradition, European classical music, and American jazz and blues; dominated by melismatic, circular melodies that pleasingly bend and swerve, it has been variously and inadequately described as ‘Ethiopian melodic blues or ragtime piano’ and a form of ‘Ethio-jazz’. Emahoy began to write music in the 1940s and continued until her death in March, 2023, not long before her 100th birthday.
Born in 1923 to an influential Ethiopian family in Addis Ababa, many of whom were exiled, became prisoners of war, or executed following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, she was sent at a young age to a Swiss boarding school, where she studied violin and piano before returning to her homeland. Offered a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Emahoy was denied the chance to take it up by the authorities, for reasons that remain unclear, so she turned to religion and was ordained as a nun, spending a decade at the Gishen Mariam monastery in northern Ethiopia. ‘I took off my shoes and went barefoot for ten years’, she said; ‘no shoes, no music, just prayer’. Emahoy later returned to live with her family and composed some of her best-known pieces, such as ‘Homesickness’ and ‘The Homeless Wanderer’, but in 1984 she left Ethiopia and went to Jerusalem, where she took a vow of poverty and remained at the Ethiopian Orthodox monastery for the rest of her life, performing and recording occasionally, usually to raise money for charity, and it was from her room at Debre Genet that the tapes for her new album, ‘Souvenirs’, were recovered.
I’ve been looking forward to the record for some months, ever since listening to ‘Clouds Moving on the Sky’ - one of the tracks on the album and the first time I’d heard Emahoy sing - and it has now been released, contained within a golden sleeve that has her portrait on the front and a reproduction of one of her religious paintings on the reverse. Sung in Amharic and taped on a domestic cassette recorder in the family home in Addis Ababa during a time of political unrest, it embraces occasional extraneous sounds, such as birdsong, which accentuate the music’s informal intimacy. It is a beautiful record, for as ‘The New Yorker’ once wrote about an earlier release, ‘her playing evokes the delicacy and grace of early spring: a sparrow alighting on a branch, a wildflower bending toward the sun, a tiny, persistent sorrow. It’s the sort of thing - soothing, meditative, elegant - that immediately softens everyone who hears it’.
A few weeks ago a friend in London sent me a postcard of a painting by Pasquarosa, an artist of whom I wasn’t aware, which was on show at an exhibition of fifty of her drawings and paintings at the delightful Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art. Beginning as a young model for artists, including the painter Nino Bertoletti, whom she later married, Pasquarosa Marcelli soon dropped her surname and became an artist herself. This was remarkable enough, as she was born in poverty in the rural commune of Anticoli Corrado in the Lazio region and had no formal education. Teaching herself to read as well as to paint, she came to know many well-known writers and artists and developed a reasonably successful career, although in recent times she has been more or less forgotten.
Pasquarosa’s pictures are mainly still lifes, loosely handled in vivid colours, of flowers, cloths, crockery, and other ordinary objects, often arranged on a tabletop and presented as though they were among the loveliest things in the world. They have something in common with the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard, although they are less sophisticated, and occasionally evoke the gentle candour of Winifred Nicholson. When she turns from objects to people, her ingenuous gaze remains benign and forthright; the portrait of the Italian artist Felice Carena, for whom she had modelled, painted as a pale face with intense blue eyes and bright orange beard and hair, is a winning combination of naive observation and humour. Perhaps the most captivating piece in the show, however, is ‘Jug and Little Bird’, the subject of the postcard I received, which shows a robust terracotta pitcher, decorated with orange and black, that bears a bird on its lip. The painting’s sense of wonder is as clear as its confidently outlined forms; in her best pictures, which tend to be the early ones, Pasquarosa depicted subjects that she loved and filled them with pleasure. They are paintings ‘to gladden the heart’, as ‘The Observer’ reviewer put it, and many of them share the deeply felt innocence and sincerity that suffuse Emahoy’s music.
For further exploration:
Emahoy’s website: https://www.emahoymusicpublisher.com/
A review of ‘Souvenirs’: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emahoy-tsegue-maryam-guebrou-souvenirs/
A song from’Souvenirs’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE0cWhuzsSU&list=OLAK5uy_nffzFJciF7Ua_08acx5nIrwPDH1mj524E&index=6
A review of the Pasquarosa exhibition: https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/pasquarosa-from-muse-to-painter-review-estorick-collection-modern-italian-art
Image on index page: a still life by Pasquarosa
‘Jug and Little Bird’, c 1918-30, by Pasquarosa. Oil on pressed cardboard, 68 x 48 cm. Courtesy Archivio Nino e Pasquarosa Bertoletti, Rome.