“WRITTEN ON HEAVEN”
A PORTRAIT OF
EMAHOY TSEGE-MARIAM GEBRU
PERFORMANCES:
ALL TICKETS ARE NOW SOLD OUT
I. Sunday, November 2, 2025 | 8 pm
II. Monday, November 3, 2025 | 8 pm
Shatto Chapel at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
540 S Commonwealth Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90020
ALL TICKETS ARE NOW SOLD OUT
I. Sunday, November 2, 2025 | 8 pm
II. Monday, November 3, 2025 | 8 pm
Shatto Chapel at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
540 S Commonwealth Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90020
“I didn’t want to be famous, really. I asked God that my name be written on Heaven, not on Earth.”
Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru
Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru
Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
TICKETS:
Seating in Shatto Chapel at FCCLA will be General Admission.
Tickets are $25 for General Admission, and $50 for Patron Tickets. [Student tickets are sold out.]
Patron Seating will be marked as “Reserved” and will be located at the center of the chapel's seating area.
If you or a guest has any special seating needs, please contact us. We will be happy to help!
PROGRAM:
PRELUDE:
J.S. BACH (arr. György KURTÁG) – Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (1707)
WORKS BY EMAHOY TSEGE-MARIAM GEBRU:
Song of the Sea (1946)
Ballad of the Spirits (1947)
Song of Abayi (1959)
Playback: Emahoy's recording of mahlet
Essay on Mahlet, The Prayer of Saint Yared (1963)
Mother's Love (1963)
Jerusalem (1970)
INTERMISSION
Spring Ode – Meskerem (1972)
Movement from Rainbow Sonata (1973)
Farewell Eve (1973)
Playback: Quand la mer furieuse (1975)
Quo Vadis (1981)
The Homeless Wanderer (1951)
POSTLUDE:
J.S. BACH (arr. G. KURTÁG) – Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (reprise)
PERFORMERS:
Thomas FENG, pianist and co-curator
with Gloria CHENG, pianist (Kurtág / Bach)
Myra Hinrichs, violin I
Er-Gene Kahng (Nov 2), Xenia Deviatkina-Loh (Nov 3), violin II
Wendy Richman, viola
Chris Cho, cello
Matt Kline, bass
PRELUDE:
J.S. BACH (arr. György KURTÁG) – Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (1707)
WORKS BY EMAHOY TSEGE-MARIAM GEBRU:
Song of the Sea (1946)
Ballad of the Spirits (1947)
Song of Abayi (1959)
Playback: Emahoy's recording of mahlet
Essay on Mahlet, The Prayer of Saint Yared (1963)
Mother's Love (1963)
Jerusalem (1970)
INTERMISSION
Spring Ode – Meskerem (1972)
Movement from Rainbow Sonata (1973)
Farewell Eve (1973)
Playback: Quand la mer furieuse (1975)
Quo Vadis (1981)
The Homeless Wanderer (1951)
POSTLUDE:
J.S. BACH (arr. G. KURTÁG) – Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (reprise)
PERFORMERS:
Thomas FENG, pianist and co-curator
with Gloria CHENG, pianist (Kurtág / Bach)
Myra Hinrichs, violin I
Er-Gene Kahng (Nov 2), Xenia Deviatkina-Loh (Nov 3), violin II
Wendy Richman, viola
Chris Cho, cello
Matt Kline, bass
PROJECT DESCRIPTION (BY THOMAS FENG):
An elderly, reclusive Ethiopian nun makes an unlikely celebrity. By her own account, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru “didn’t want to be famous, really. I asked … God that my name be written on Heaven, not on Earth.” And yet, international attention arrived in 2006, when the French record label Buda Musique released a compilation of her piano compositions as the twenty-first volume of its celebrated archival reissue series, Éthiopiques. Previously, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam’s music had circulated only on occasional limited-run records dedicated to raising funds for local charitable causes. Éthiopiques introduced those same recordings to a cultivated metropolitan audience, eager to spread the “Musical Secret, Hidden Away at an Ethiopian Convent in Jerusalem.” Since then, her music has even been licensed for use in films and advertisements on both sides of the Atlantic, garnered a robust streaming listenership, and appeared on a steadily growing number of concert and recital programs.
The confluence of commercial success and personal privacy has generated for Emahoy Tsege-Mariam an aura of mystique among her global public over the two decades since the release of Éthiopiques, Vol. 21. Rare for a composer of any stature, she was certifiably a “legend” even before her passing in March 2023, a status bolstered by both the “otherworldly” quality of her solo recordings and the biographical narratives of withdrawal and exile promulgated in popular media. Such a degree of recognition befits such an exceptional figure as she: few are likely to be familiar with many composers and pianists of either Ethiopian heritage or monastic inclination, and – as Emahoy Tsege-Mariam herself was well aware – one would be hard pressed to name another woman hailing from the African continent who composed in the Western classical tradition, as early as she did. (Neither Schoenberg nor Sibelius had yet died when she wrote her first composition, “Song of the Sea,” in 1946.)
Like an autobiography, Emahoy's compositions intertwine tightly with the vicissitudes of her life. This program chronologically traces her journey from her austere novitiate, through her restless years of pilgrimage, to her final exile to her beloved Jerusalem. Alongside several of her most celebrated solo piano works, new arrangements of her unscored symphonic music will illuminate yet unheard depths of her compositional ambitions. What emerges is an original, cosmopolitan voice, charting out an alternate modernism entirely outside the Western avant-garde. From out of the realm of otherworldly "legend," Emahoy's music resounds with earthly grace, wisdom, and power, and expresses the worldly contradictions she herself lived and embodied.
The confluence of commercial success and personal privacy has generated for Emahoy Tsege-Mariam an aura of mystique among her global public over the two decades since the release of Éthiopiques, Vol. 21. Rare for a composer of any stature, she was certifiably a “legend” even before her passing in March 2023, a status bolstered by both the “otherworldly” quality of her solo recordings and the biographical narratives of withdrawal and exile promulgated in popular media. Such a degree of recognition befits such an exceptional figure as she: few are likely to be familiar with many composers and pianists of either Ethiopian heritage or monastic inclination, and – as Emahoy Tsege-Mariam herself was well aware – one would be hard pressed to name another woman hailing from the African continent who composed in the Western classical tradition, as early as she did. (Neither Schoenberg nor Sibelius had yet died when she wrote her first composition, “Song of the Sea,” in 1946.)
Like an autobiography, Emahoy's compositions intertwine tightly with the vicissitudes of her life. This program chronologically traces her journey from her austere novitiate, through her restless years of pilgrimage, to her final exile to her beloved Jerusalem. Alongside several of her most celebrated solo piano works, new arrangements of her unscored symphonic music will illuminate yet unheard depths of her compositional ambitions. What emerges is an original, cosmopolitan voice, charting out an alternate modernism entirely outside the Western avant-garde. From out of the realm of otherworldly "legend," Emahoy's music resounds with earthly grace, wisdom, and power, and expresses the worldly contradictions she herself lived and embodied.
ARTIST BIOS:
EMAHOY TSEGE-MARIAM GEBRU
Yewubdar Gebru was born in Addis Ababa on December 12, 1923 to a privileged family. Her father Kentiba Gebru and her mother Kassaye Yelemtu both had a place in high society. Yewubdar was sent to Switzerland at the age of six along with her sister Senedu Gebru. Both attended a girls' boarding school where Yewubdar took violin lessons.
She gave her first violin recital at the age of ten. She returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to continue her studies at the Empress Menen Secondary School. In 1937 young Yewubdar and her family were taken prisoners of war by the Italians and deported to the island of Asinara, north of Sardinia, and later to Mercogliano near Naples.
After the war Yewubdar resumed her musical studies in Cairo, under a Polish violinist named Alexander Kontorowicz. She also took piano lessons with a “Polish master” whose name she later forgot. Yewubdar returned to Ethiopia accompanied by Ms. Kontorowicz and she served as an administrative assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later as a secretary in the Imperial Body Guard. Unfortunately Yewubdar lost touch with Alexander Kontorowicz and found out years later that he had been teaching music in Addis Ababa without having reached out to her.
Young Yewubdar secretly fled Addis Ababa at the age of 24 to enter the Gishen Mariam monastery in the Wello region where she had once before visited with her mother. She took on the title Emahoy and her name was changed to Tsege Mariam. There was no piano at Gishen, so Emahoy would travel back and forth between the monastery and Addis Ababa, playing the piano at her family’s home until deep into the night. She went on to write many compositions for the piano, organ, and her own voice.
In the early 1960s, Emahoy lived in Gondar and immersed herself in the religious music of St Yared, composer, and father of Mahlet, the early Ethiopian religious musician. She attended the Liturgy and made extensive efforts to learn the music herself. On her daily trips to and from the church, she came across young students in Liturgy known as "yekolo temari" One day she asked why these young people sleep outdoor by the church gate. She was told they beg for food and lodging and are homeless while they pursue their education with the church. Emahoy was deeply moved by the sacrifices these young people made to study the Mahlet. “Although I did not have money to give them, I was determined to use my music to help these and other young people to get an education,” Emahoy told Alula Kebede in her interview on his Amharic radio program on the Voice of America.
Emahoy's first and second records were released in Germany in 1963 with the help of Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1972 she released two more recordings: the first raised funds for an orphanage for children of soldiers who died fighting at war, founded by her sister, Desta Gebru; the second raised money for the Ethiopian church in Jerusalem. In keeping with this tradition, EMF gives disadvantaged children access to music lessons. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru donated her previously published and unpublished music for the use of the EMF to raise funds for grants and scholarships.
Emahoy left Ethiopia following her mother's death in 1984 and fled to Jerusalem, Israel because socialist doctrine in Ethiopia during the reign of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam attacked her religious beliefs. Emahoy’s most popular collection of songs, Ethiopiques 21, was released in 2006, and in 2008 she played a rare concert in DC to benefit the newly-founded Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation. In 2013, Jerusalem Season of Culture hosted concernts in commemoration of Emahoy’s 90th birthday. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 99. Recordings of Emahoy’s compositions are still being published, and her legacy endures through the work of the Foundation. Around the world her story and music continues to be discovered and celebrated.
Emahoy's legacy is the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, a self-financed non-profit that funds music education programs in Ethiopia and the U.S.
She gave her first violin recital at the age of ten. She returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to continue her studies at the Empress Menen Secondary School. In 1937 young Yewubdar and her family were taken prisoners of war by the Italians and deported to the island of Asinara, north of Sardinia, and later to Mercogliano near Naples.
After the war Yewubdar resumed her musical studies in Cairo, under a Polish violinist named Alexander Kontorowicz. She also took piano lessons with a “Polish master” whose name she later forgot. Yewubdar returned to Ethiopia accompanied by Ms. Kontorowicz and she served as an administrative assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later as a secretary in the Imperial Body Guard. Unfortunately Yewubdar lost touch with Alexander Kontorowicz and found out years later that he had been teaching music in Addis Ababa without having reached out to her.
Young Yewubdar secretly fled Addis Ababa at the age of 24 to enter the Gishen Mariam monastery in the Wello region where she had once before visited with her mother. She took on the title Emahoy and her name was changed to Tsege Mariam. There was no piano at Gishen, so Emahoy would travel back and forth between the monastery and Addis Ababa, playing the piano at her family’s home until deep into the night. She went on to write many compositions for the piano, organ, and her own voice.
In the early 1960s, Emahoy lived in Gondar and immersed herself in the religious music of St Yared, composer, and father of Mahlet, the early Ethiopian religious musician. She attended the Liturgy and made extensive efforts to learn the music herself. On her daily trips to and from the church, she came across young students in Liturgy known as "yekolo temari" One day she asked why these young people sleep outdoor by the church gate. She was told they beg for food and lodging and are homeless while they pursue their education with the church. Emahoy was deeply moved by the sacrifices these young people made to study the Mahlet. “Although I did not have money to give them, I was determined to use my music to help these and other young people to get an education,” Emahoy told Alula Kebede in her interview on his Amharic radio program on the Voice of America.
Emahoy's first and second records were released in Germany in 1963 with the help of Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1972 she released two more recordings: the first raised funds for an orphanage for children of soldiers who died fighting at war, founded by her sister, Desta Gebru; the second raised money for the Ethiopian church in Jerusalem. In keeping with this tradition, EMF gives disadvantaged children access to music lessons. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru donated her previously published and unpublished music for the use of the EMF to raise funds for grants and scholarships.
Emahoy left Ethiopia following her mother's death in 1984 and fled to Jerusalem, Israel because socialist doctrine in Ethiopia during the reign of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam attacked her religious beliefs. Emahoy’s most popular collection of songs, Ethiopiques 21, was released in 2006, and in 2008 she played a rare concert in DC to benefit the newly-founded Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation. In 2013, Jerusalem Season of Culture hosted concernts in commemoration of Emahoy’s 90th birthday. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 99. Recordings of Emahoy’s compositions are still being published, and her legacy endures through the work of the Foundation. Around the world her story and music continues to be discovered and celebrated.
Emahoy's legacy is the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, a self-financed non-profit that funds music education programs in Ethiopia and the U.S.
THOMAS FENG
Thomas T. Feng is a pianist, composer, and music scholar.
As a pianist, he performs principally works of modern and contemporary literature, including new works by living composers and several works of his own. Notable engagements include premieres of solo works by Eve Beglarian, Salina Fisher, Reiko Füting, James Newton, Kurt Rohde, Nicky Sohn, Tui St. George Tucker, and Sam Wu; ensemble performances with Da Capo Chamber Players and Wild Up; and appearances at the Kennedy Center, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), TIME:SPANS (NYC), and Brooklyn Folk Festival. He is also an accomplished flutist.
His own compositions represent an experimental approach toward expressive warmth and charm, and have garnered awards and recognition from such institutions as ASCAP (Morton Gould Award), UCLA School of Music (Hugo Davise Prize), and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (YoungARTS), and performances by richard valitutto, Verdant Vibes, Wild Up, Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, and the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. An album of original solo piano music, titled i am a tricky pear, and a “quarantine album” we have music at home, are available on Bandcamp.
Principal research interests include piano music after 1900, modernism (within and beyond the West), and music notation and archival media as sites of transhistorical access. Editorial endeavors resulting from this scholarship have been published by Wise Music Classical, Mississippi Records, and Emahoy Music Publisher. His scholarship on the life and music of the Ethiopian nun and composer, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru, has been referenced in The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Songlines; an excerpt of his dissertation on the subject is forthcoming in an edited volume with Oxford University Press.
Outside of music, Thomas enjoys foraging for fruits and flowers in nearby urban forests, and making wine from them. He is also the proud co-parent of three adopted cats: Langshaw, Daisy, and Nala.
Thomas holds a DMA in Performance Practice from Cornell University, an MM in Contemporary Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, and a BA in Music Composition, summa cum laude, from UCLA. His teachers include Xak Bjerken, Andrew Zhou, Margaret Kampmeier, Christopher Oldfather, Anthony de Mare, Mark Carlson, Sean Friar, Gloria Cheng, David Conte and Claude Monteux.
More information at www.thomasfengmusic.com.
As a pianist, he performs principally works of modern and contemporary literature, including new works by living composers and several works of his own. Notable engagements include premieres of solo works by Eve Beglarian, Salina Fisher, Reiko Füting, James Newton, Kurt Rohde, Nicky Sohn, Tui St. George Tucker, and Sam Wu; ensemble performances with Da Capo Chamber Players and Wild Up; and appearances at the Kennedy Center, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), TIME:SPANS (NYC), and Brooklyn Folk Festival. He is also an accomplished flutist.
His own compositions represent an experimental approach toward expressive warmth and charm, and have garnered awards and recognition from such institutions as ASCAP (Morton Gould Award), UCLA School of Music (Hugo Davise Prize), and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (YoungARTS), and performances by richard valitutto, Verdant Vibes, Wild Up, Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, and the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. An album of original solo piano music, titled i am a tricky pear, and a “quarantine album” we have music at home, are available on Bandcamp.
Principal research interests include piano music after 1900, modernism (within and beyond the West), and music notation and archival media as sites of transhistorical access. Editorial endeavors resulting from this scholarship have been published by Wise Music Classical, Mississippi Records, and Emahoy Music Publisher. His scholarship on the life and music of the Ethiopian nun and composer, Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru, has been referenced in The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Songlines; an excerpt of his dissertation on the subject is forthcoming in an edited volume with Oxford University Press.
Outside of music, Thomas enjoys foraging for fruits and flowers in nearby urban forests, and making wine from them. He is also the proud co-parent of three adopted cats: Langshaw, Daisy, and Nala.
Thomas holds a DMA in Performance Practice from Cornell University, an MM in Contemporary Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, and a BA in Music Composition, summa cum laude, from UCLA. His teachers include Xak Bjerken, Andrew Zhou, Margaret Kampmeier, Christopher Oldfather, Anthony de Mare, Mark Carlson, Sean Friar, Gloria Cheng, David Conte and Claude Monteux.
More information at www.thomasfengmusic.com.
GLORIA CHENG
Acclaimed for performances of “commanding technique, color, and imagination” (The New York Times), GRAMMY- and Emmy-winning pianist Gloria Cheng is a leading proponent of the music of our time. Over a varied and distinguished career, she has collaborated with renowned composers across the stylistic spectrum, premiering works by John Adams, Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, Anthony Davis, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky, John Williams, and many others. The Washington Post has called her playing “spectacular… emotionally engaging."
Gloria has appeared as a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Boulez and Zubin Mehta, and on the orchestra’s legendary Green Umbrella series with Salonen and Oliver Knussen. She has appeared in recital on the Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and Radio France, and multiple times on the Other Minds and Ojai Music Festivals.
Winner of the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) GRAMMY for her 2008 recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc, The Edge of Light: Messiaen I Saariaho.
Two of her most distinctive projects involve eminent composers working outside their usual comfort zones. For MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, she enlisted Bruce Broughton, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, and John Williams to compose new works for solo piano, captured in a documentary that earned her a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy.
In a similar vein, Gloria commissioned six distinguished improvising artists — Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, James Newton, Arturo O’Farrill, Linda May Han Oh, and Gernot Wolfgang — to compose fully-notated solo works for her latest album, Root Progressions, released in January 2025 on the Biophilia label.
Gloria’s education includes a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. Her popular classes and programs at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music bring students together with noted performers, composers, and scholars.
Gloria has appeared as a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Boulez and Zubin Mehta, and on the orchestra’s legendary Green Umbrella series with Salonen and Oliver Knussen. She has appeared in recital on the Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, and Radio France, and multiple times on the Other Minds and Ojai Music Festivals.
Winner of the Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) GRAMMY for her 2008 recording, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc, The Edge of Light: Messiaen I Saariaho.
Two of her most distinctive projects involve eminent composers working outside their usual comfort zones. For MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, she enlisted Bruce Broughton, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, and John Williams to compose new works for solo piano, captured in a documentary that earned her a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy.
In a similar vein, Gloria commissioned six distinguished improvising artists — Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, James Newton, Arturo O’Farrill, Linda May Han Oh, and Gernot Wolfgang — to compose fully-notated solo works for her latest album, Root Progressions, released in January 2025 on the Biophilia label.
Gloria’s education includes a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. Her popular classes and programs at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music bring students together with noted performers, composers, and scholars.