Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou
Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play the game. As critics line up with features (or increasingly, listicles) presenting their favoured contenders for Song of the Summer, it can feel like a contest where everyone tries to eat the same garbage. The impulse is natural: As Ryan McNutt recently wrote for The Walrus, “we use music to build collective experiences … [and the] experiences we romanticize as distinctly summery – think beaches, BBQs, outdoor weddings, lantern-lit backyards – warrant a particular soundtrack.” But something demeaning can take place when our longing for a shared experience meets the market incentive to sell every consumer the same thing. Some very large corporations want us to make our Junes, Julys and Augusts as generic as possible.Which isn’t to say that I can’t festoon Drake’s One Dance across my lantern-lit backyard. (NB: I don’t have a backyard.) Let’s just pay attention to the specific needs of our particular seasons, and to when those needs diverge from commercial radio’s pummelling algorithms. Life is more than a badly-DJed wedding dance.
This is an awful long way of getting around to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose songs I have not heard wafting out of a single rolled-down car window. She is a 92-year-old Ethiopian nun. She writes music for solo piano. And she is as perfect a summer soundtrack as cicadas, surf or sprinklers. (Her music also works well in spring or winter. Or in fall.)
Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s is not a household name. Yet in certain circles she summons the kind of reverence that’s usually reserved for ABBA, Neil Young, Miles Davis or A Tribe Called Quest. And although each piece is formally composed (you can even purchase the sheet music), her playful, expressive performances connect her as clearly to Bill Evans or Jellyroll Morton as to Fauré, Satie or Debussy. Often they call this kind of stuff “drawing-room music,” because it is peaceful and intimate enough for a 19th-century parlour; except to me it evokes wider spaces – not just open doorways but long, rosy skies.
Meditative piano music is easy to contrive. Amateurs can noodle across a key, luxuriate in the instrument’s long resound. I once sat transfixed in a Belizean living-room, listening to an eccentric millionaire improvise on an ivory-white baby grand. (The moment was exquisite; the music execrable.) But at a certain point there’s no use policing the genre: With any given piece, you either feel its gravity or you don’t. An argument probably won’t sway you, any more than your lilac can be convinced to stay in bloom. Everyone has a right to enjoy whatever it is their summer needs, whether it’s Billy Joel or Bohuslav Martin. Just share it with your neighbour – it’s worth a try.
Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.