Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the composer and piano-playing nun who died this week at the age of 99, had an extraordinary life, which included being a trailblazer for women’s equality and walking barefoot for a decade in the isolated mountains of northern Ethiopia.

Listening to one of her works can be disconcerting.

It sometimes feels like being tossed around in a small boat at sea, constantly off balance, with little to hold on to. The time signature appears to shift and the scale drifts in and out of familiarity.

The sound of the pioneering pianist reflected the way her life oscillated between parallel worlds.

She was trained in Western classical music but was equally the product of traditional Orthodox Christian chants and tunes.

Her unique musical voice led one critic, Kate Molleson, to argue that Emahoy should be included alongside more familiar names when considering great 20th Century composers.

As a young person, Emahoy was a free-spirited modern woman but she spent much of her later life as a reclusive.

She became a devout nun who lived a humble life in a monastery in a remote part of her country. But in an earlier time she had moved in the high society of the capital, Addis Ababa, where she performed in the court of the country’s last Emperor, Haileselassie I.

Most of her important musical works – recognisable in their complexity and apparent effortlessness – came in the 1960s and 1970s.

This was during a time when her contemporaries in Addis Ababa were blending Western beats with the Ethiopian pentatonic – or five-note – scale to create a unique fusion of sounds and styles that would later be dubbed Ethio-jazz.

The genre is marked by shuffling soul and funky music as well as big-band swing pieces.

But Emahoy’s compositions and style were distinct. They were just her and her piano producing an intimate, meditative – and unsettling – melancholy informed by a fascinating life punctuated by the momentous events her country experienced during the last century….