Deux Danses à Agni Yavishta JA 77 & 78, AWV 61, 1932/3

The 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris was to be highly influential on the eclectic compositional palate used by Alain following his visits to the event. A wide range of music and dance was on show from the French colonies in North Africa, the south Sahara and India. A fellow student, Denise Launey wrote, ‘The rhythms, the exotic timbres, the instruments unknown to the young city-dweller, those foreign modal scales… how foreign to the tonal language taught at the Conservatoire’.

The earliest music that bears the influences of this immersion into Eastern cultural exoticism and jazz music appeared as a work for piano entitled Togo (a French colony). The organ work Médine (now the city of Mali) followed in 1932. These two works were joined in 1933 to form the organ work Deux Danses à Agni Yavishta, a homage to the God of Fire and the God of the Home Hearth.

Yavishta means ‘very young’, and the rather puckish nature of the God Agni’s youthful vigour permeates both movements. The slow-moving passages in the second dance remind me of a slow procession of heavy elephants, something which may well have been seen by Alain at the Exposition!

Deux Danses was premiered by Noëlie Pierront at the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris on the March 23rd, 1941. This event involved a small gathering of friends who met on this Sunday afternoon to honour the memory of their deceased friend and colleague Jehan, by playing a selection of his music. The work was later published in 1943 by Leduc, Paris.