Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (born Yewubdar Guèbrou, 12 December 1923 – 26 March 2023) was an Ethiopian composer, pianist, and nun. She is generally known as Emahoy, a religious honorific.

For three decades, she lived a reclusive life with only rare performances including one at the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C., on 12 July 2008. Three tribute concerts were held in Jerusalem in 2013 to mark her 90th birthday, and a compilation of her musical scores were released.

Prior to this, Emahoy did not release any of her music made during the 1970s to the 1990s, due to the coup by the Derg party in 1974, which imposed a dictator-like reign on Ethiopia. The Derg Party heavily policed music that was not government or military oriented. Due to this, there was a resurgence of Emahoy’s compositions from the 1960s and 1970s, when a compilation of Emahoy’s work was issued on the Éthiopiques record label. The album, entitled Éthiopiques Volume 21: Ethiopia Song, was released by Francis Falceto in 2006.

Emahoy also appeared on the 2012 album The Rough Guide to the Music of Ethiopia, and the 2011 album The Rough Guide to African Lullabies. During her life, Emahoy composed over 150 songs for piano, organ, opera, and chamber ensembles.

Emahoy’s composition style has been described as a meld of various genres and musical scales. While her music has been described as both jazz and melodic blues piano with rhythmically complex phrasing, it has equally been described as having the musical quality of 19th century European romantic classical piano, due to her utilization of tempo rubato within her music. Simultaneously, she has employed the use of Kiñit, Tizita and Bati, which are all Qenets, or five note pentatonic musical scales specific to Ethiopian music. Further, some of Emahoy’s compositions possess chikchika rhythm, a 6/8 rhythm equally found often in Ethiopian heterophonic music. The melding of both European and Ethiopian compositional techniques can be specifically observed within her songs “The Homeless Wanderer” and “Presentiment”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emahoy_Tsegu%C3%A9-Maryam_Gu%C3%A8brou#Composition_style