Mississippi’s own Maria Barrios spoke with Thomas Feng, a pianist, composer, and scholar working on a dissertation on Emahoy’s life and music at Cornell University. Thomas has opened new pathways in the study and scholarship of Emahoy’s work, attempting to interpret her within the canon of classical composers rather than as an “otherworldly” outsider. Thomas traveled to Jerusalem with Cyrus and later analyzed dozens of hours of Emahoy’s recordings to determine the master takes for the Souvenirs album. Few have engaged with Emahoy’s work more deeply as either scholar or performer.

Maria Barrios: How did you get into Emahoy’s music?

Thomas Feng: I feel I should have a ready response but every two weeks it changes. I think I must have first heard her music in 2018 or 2019. I was finishing up a master's degree in contemporary performance at the Manhattan School of Music. So I was around a lot of avant-garde music heads—plenty of New Yorky Brooklyn queer hipsters who are interested in weird music. And I just began to hear her name in the air.

It was interesting to know that her music was recorded in the '60s and '70s because it sounded older. To my ear, I thought this sounded kind of antique. There is an article written by Ethan Iverson that describes her music as kind of an antique despite being recorded relatively late into the century. Because it sounds "older than its time" it presented an altogether different view of modernity than I was accustomed to. I'm more familiar with narratives that cast 1960-75 as the height of postwar European abstraction and rock and roll. But then thinking of the revolutionary music my parents heard while they were growing up in China at the same time, or Emahoy's piano music – it feels as if on a different timeline, but who's to say it's any less "modern"? This parallax fascinates me.

Then I learned about her story. She's often called a spiritual guide. As a musician beginning to question institutions of higher learning (regarding classical music education), I was like, this is someone who is making the music she wanted to make, it is unlike any other music anyone has ever heard, and she wanted people to hear it. But it existed outside the mainstream infrastructure of how music is distributed and heard in our world, until she turned 85, broadly speaking. She put out records throughout her life but it wasn't until 2006 that she hit the sort of cult figure status. That was inspirational to me, because the music was enchanting, and it also represented a sort of homegrown DIY ethos that I really admired.

It took a while for me to listen to the tracks and be able to understand the differences between them. I think if you don't listen closely, they begin to blend into one another. They reward a lot of close and repeated listening, and I still find new things in them all the time. I was so mystified by the way that her music traveled. It seems improbable that you could write music on your own and alone your entire life. And then, at the very end of your life, have this multimedia explosion across the world and be considered cool, no less.

MB: Our listeners write to us about her music all the time, and it's beautiful.

TF: Yeah. Hanna [Kebbede, Emahoy’s niece and musical steward] once asked me “Why do you think she appeals so much to millennials and Gen Z?” For me, it's not punk, but Emahoy is sort of like, “I don't even resist the institution, I just exist fully outside of it on my own, and music is the way I find comfort for my own life. So I just do it however I want to do it.” 

We millennials are often said to be disillusioned. We don't believe in stuff. We were very ironic. We were born at the end of the 20th century and have lived to see a bunch of global catastrophes ever since. But her music isn't ironic. It radiates the kind of sincerity that gives people something to believe in. And it sounds as if someone had really hard-earned that. It's not just someone telling us, “No, it's fine, it's okay.” No. She really went through it, and you can hear that.

MB: What do you remember about your phone conversations with Emahoy?

TF: I think it must have been maybe November of 2021. I had no idea what to say. I don't remember much of that first conversation. But the first communication that was not a call was in April after I had played “Woigaye, Don't Cry Anymore” and Hanna had sent my performance to her. Emahoy had written back with very idiosyncratic punctuation, and she wrote, “I listened to the pianist play. Very well. But not my music.” And then she wrote, “There are several mistakes, the left hand softer, and the tempo must be moderato.” Also in the same email, she said, “Coming down the scale, he must play with a sad feeling.” And I was like, what..? I felt like I was playing pretty sad.

I remember being frustrated on all these different levels. And I remember speaking to a professor, Ben Piekut, who said, “Have you considered that your expectations might not be fair? You say there was no score. You say there was no performance practice… But what if her saying ‘play the right hand with a sad feeling’ is the score? What if you seriously consider that it is you who is missing something and that it is not she who doesn't know what she's talking about?” So I thought, okay, what gaps would I need to fill for me to understand where she's coming from? So I think that ended up being, in fact, the entire basis of my dissertation.

After you get to know her and how she thinks, playing from her manuscripts does feel possible. And certain basic assumptions begin to feel natural. There are still plenty of pieces that I cannot make heads or tails of, but then there are other pieces that I look at now and think “This is probably how it goes,” with a fair amount of confidence.

MB: What did you discover by playing her music that differs from the act of listening?

TF: One thing I discovered is that her music feels physically very good to play. It's very ergonomic. Before recording, I think piano music was written quite differently. It was quite important how the pianist physically felt. For example, pianists often love to play Chopin because it feels like it's written for the hand. And that also affects how the music sounds. Chopin wrote music often in such a way that if you just did what felt right, and you manage a particular kind of kinesthetic sensation, then it would just produce the rhythm rather than having to execute the rhythm from the brain. And I realized that if I, instead of trying to count everything, felt it in the body, the rhythm would come naturally.

I used to have this notion that her music was… so the term complex is very loaded. I do think it is very complex music in that it's emotionally complex. There's a lot happening underneath the surface. There's a lot to explore, talk about, and analyze. But often, I think the term complex is also used to mean it's hard. It's tricky, it's difficult. When I think of the term complex, I think “Oh, it's fussy.” I don't feel that way about her music at all. It breathes in very long lines. It has a very natural sense of space and airiness. There's also an emotional dimension to her music that I've discovered just by playing it over and over, which feels very dense and powerful.

MB: Speaking of emotional intensity… you played at her funeral. What was supposed to be your first in-person meeting ended up being a farewell. How was that experience?

TF: Cyrus and I had not yet departed when we got the call that she passed. It was sad. But her health hadn't been good for a while. So I felt like I was pretty emotionally prepared for that eventuality. I think about the trip every day. It was very emotionally overwhelming. Surreal, actually a lot to process. Playing her piano, watching the piano being moved, seeing the monastery. It was nice to play the instrument and very meaningful to me doing so much for her family. She was buried out in the West Bank, at another Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in al-Eizariya, which is also (I learned) the town called Bethany, where the tomb of Lazarus is.

It is now even more politically surreal a time to go, but even then I was thinking, “I cannot believe I'm here… This is very strange.” Jerusalem is for me a very tense and disturbing place to be, but also achingly beautiful. There’s so much more to say about the experience of being in Israel and Palestine, but as it relates specifically to Emahoy, witnessing the world that she was a part of and that she saw every day, breathing the same air, I think it brought her closer to me. In a way, it made her more real.

Something I've been saying a lot is that I want to configure her less as a legendary figure, and more as a historical figure. Someone who breathed the same air and used cassette tapes and had to push the button and you can hear it. [Being there] was a very moving experience. Even though I never got to meet her face to face, just feeling her human presence was very meaningful.

MB: With that legendary versus historical dichotomy, what makes you want to bring her out from that legendary status to a historical, human person?

TF: So there was a book I read in preparation for my exams called Representing African Music, by Kofi Agawu. A main argument Agawu makes in the book is that Western metropolitan scholars studying African music specifically, often assume, as a baseline, a premise of difference. They're like, “That music is incommensurably different, but we want to study it, and we want to get to know it better and bring it into our world.” So it becomes a subject of scholarship. Even when ethnomusicologists presume difference, it is often out of good intention. They say, “Well, we're not them, we'll never be them. So out of respect we just assume that they and their music are different from us.”

Agawu argues that this is a problematic orientation. Because if you view, as a Western scholar with all your resources, and your cultural capital, and your material capital, and all the influence that you have, if you are studying another subject, and you keep it other by presumption, then you don't allow for what that other has to offer intellectually to engage on a bilateral basis with the Western metropole. So if you keep it other, you can study it and you can extract information from it, but you don't let it participate. It doesn't. The knowledge doesn't flow both ways.

So what he offers as a sort of reparative framework of analysis is strategic sameness, and he says if you start from a place of assuming that you have something in common, then that allows, in a certain respect, ideally, for that music to exert a reciprocal influence.

I think actually, it is especially relevant to Emahoy who was Western-educated and who specifically studied Western classical music, that there hasn't been a critical consideration of her as a classical composer. It's sort of mentioned in passing, like, “Oh, she's kind of like Chopin, kind of like Debussy, and Erik Satie, kind of like Charles Mingus.” I think it's also circumstantial, because no one's taking an academic study of her yet, in a sustained way, and classical music analysis is a highly academic, highly institutionalized conversation. So several factors play into why that classical consideration hasn't happened.

To be clear, I'm not trying to claim her as a classical composer. It's not an identity claim. But let's put on our classical music glasses, and see what her music has to tell us about classical music. I think it's been illuminating because as a woman in the middle of the 20th century from the African continent who studied classical music, to a certain extent, she has a particular view of what classical music means. What did classical music mean to her? Why did she hold on to the piano? Why in the ‘70s, did she take it upon herself to write symphonies and sonatas? She was really invested in Western classical music.

I often see Emahoy described as 'otherworldly' or 'genre-defying', which are, I think, both great compliments, but also double-edged swords: though they allow her to transcend all these cultural boundaries and reach a lot of listeners, they also sort of keep her as a sort of curiosity.

I think critically considering her classical-ness and her historical contingency as a classical composer, her ideas and attitudes become more sharply defined and can have an influence on our culture in a more defined way.

Hanna remarked to me recently that Emahoy might be called a sort of ‘disrupter’ in classical music discourse. I think at least for me, getting to know her work has been a big opportunity, a transformative experience in reconsidering the very institution of classical music that she could not be a part of. She took the aesthetic of this institution and made this music on her own, and thus configured within it a totally different set of meanings than what we are familiar with. So to get back to the question of why a historical rather than a legendary figure, I think it makes her more real, and I hope that it allows her to exert a more defined and powerful influence on our thinking about music and belonging. 

MB: What do you like the most about the music on Souvenirs? What differences do you see between this record and her other music?

TF: There's an interesting sort of concealment that she does. In Amharic, there's that kind of concept of wax and gold [In Amharic poetry, the "wax" is the obvious meaning, the "gold" is the hidden meaning]. You have to sort of look for the gold underneath. I don't feel like the songs can be taken at face value. For all that I don't want to exoticize or otherize, these are mysterious, enigmatic songs. I think you can come at them from multiple angles, and I think the hiddenness is part of the expression.

It didn't occur to me that the title itself, Souvenirs, is also a sort of wax and gold, double entendre, because we bought it at a souvenir shop. Then only later it hit me… I always thought it just meant memories, that she was looking back. Later I realized that we bought it at a souvenir shop; it’s at once a physical souvenir of our experience, but also a bunch of remembrances for herself. That didn’t even hit me until months later.

MB: It didn’t hit me until when I was writing the album’s press release. I thought, wait a minute… this music was sold as a souvenir at the monastery’s gift shop. 

TF: What I was saying was when something is hidden like that, and then you hear it, it's like you're hit by a train because it's like a revelation. It becomes an epiphany.

Souvenirs will be out on Mississippi Records on February 23rd, 2024. You can hear the album’s first single, “Clouds Moving on the Sky,” here. 

TODAY AT 5PM EST! VISIT EMAHOY’S PUBLISHER PAGE TO STREAM HER 100 YEAR ANNIVERSARY CONCERT, WHICH TOOK PLACE IN NOVEMBER AT THE KENNEDY CENTER IN DC.

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