I didn't have at this time any specific work dedicated to the guitar because I've often used it as accompaniment instrument but never as soloist or only in too specific or confidential occasion. After my first negative response owing to lack of ammunition, I meditate a few days. Immediately rises to the surface in an almost automatic way my brother Benoit's death in October 2010 at the 50 years age. This immense pain, to lose my almost twin brother, is today still very fresh in my heart and my head. I had, during the first times of his so unexpected and too fast disappearance, tried to lay down words on paper for him to say my love and this irrevocable loss but it didn't come. I told myself then that it would be a unique opportunity, which surely will never come again, to write something in his honour, large, beautiful and fort's one which would be interpreted in addition by a Brazilian guitar magician which tightens me on this occasion an unhoped-for pole come from the sky. Once the composition was completed, it was finaly another Brazilian magician guitarist, the huge virtuoso Eduardo Meirinhos, Professor Dr. in the Escola de Musica e Artes Cenicas da Universidade Federal de Goias of Goiania, who decided to take up the torch to create this work, thanks to the Jose Eduardo Martins' presentation work.
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Blessed of God is the Anglo-Saxon biblical and literal translation of the French expression "Beni de Dieu" (Benoit), a nickname we gave to Ben following our parents' gift, small frames describing our first names Latin etymology and were suspended over our children and adolescents beds in our common room. While the Latin meaning of Francois is "homme libre (free man)"... The nickname, contracted later in Beni, rightly followed him throughout his life which hasn't always been easy though he always kept a smile in adversity. Because that was my brother, a blessed of God human being, a luminous one in the darkness, a talented guitarist deeply and intimately musician - family heredity - who had an adoration for Brazil and South America and especially for their music, stayed amateur with my regret (and perhaps to his own !), a lighthouse for me, a twin brother who never departed from a calm and open-minded one, a pillar, a friend who I miss terribly today, but it's too weak a word. Although my journey in life has always been clear in my mind, I often feel since his disappearance like a navigator in the fog or under a starless night...
Initially, I wrote a work for solo guitar, but the next goal was the orchestration and later to make a duo guitar/piano version so that it can be performed in different nomenclatures (see the table below).
Aqua Simplex
I. passacaglia alla brasiliana
5'55 "
II. andante funereo
8'30 "
III. allegro vivace
6'00 "
- Guitar / Orchestra -
Total Time :
20'30"
- Guitar / Piano -
" My Ben, I hope that you'll listen this music performed by a guitar angel since the sky with the loudspeakers installed up there, composed by your brother in honor to your musical genius which misses us terrifically today. I didn't find other means to tell all of it to you. "
Benoit GOURDIN-SERVENIERE (1959-2010)
Coypright 2010 photo : Anne GOURDIN-SERVENIERE
Ben, Ushuaia in 2005
Coypright 2005 photo : Marie-Neige PIMOUNET (in front of an icefall...)
Buy the PDF of the.jpg)
