Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the Ethiopian nun revered for her distinctive piano compositions and charitable contributions, has died, according to Ethiopia’s state-run outlet Fana Broadcasting Corporate. She was 99 years old. 

Guèbrou was born on December 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As part of a well-off family, Guèbrou began studying music in her youth, beginning with the violin in the early 1930s. She spent time as a prisoner of war as Ethiopia fought to gain independence from its Italian colonizers in the late 1930s, which interrupted her practice, but she resumed her studies in Cairo. 

Guèbrou committed to a monastic life as a young adult, taking up at Guishen Mariam monastery in Ethiopia’s Wello province at age 19, after the Ethopian government had denied her an opportunity to study music in London. She found spiritual clarity and satisfaction through music, composing for violin, piano, and organ; she found inspiration from classical and liturgical canons along with popular Western styles like blues and ragtime. Guèbrou released her first album in 1967, donating the proceeds to young people in her community who were impoverished and seeking an education. She continued to release albums as a way to raise money for charitable causes, focusing on aid to Ethiopian children orphaned by war.

In Guèbrou’s later years, her music attracted the attention of music fans outside her home country, who were drawn to her gentle, unique compositions. Director Garrett Bradley used her work to soundtrack her documentary Time, about the toll of incarceration. “I like how open-ended time can be. Emahoy’s music is like that in many ways—and yet it also is something radically pointed,” Bradley told Pitchfork in 2020. “She frames her own sense of time, she molds it to her liking.” A new collection of Guèbrou’s music, titled Jerusalem, is slated to arrive on April 14.

In 2007, Guèbrou’s family members helped establish the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, which underwent a revival in 2014. The nonprofit organization has a corporation that administers the rights to Guèbrou’s music in addition to developing cultural programming in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C. According to FBC, Guèbrou relocated to the Ethiopian Monastery in Jerusalem in 1984 after the death of her mother, and she remained for the rest of her life.