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Ces nymphes, je les veux perptuer: the post-war pastoral in space-age bachelor-pad music
Rebecca Leydon
Popular Music / Volume 22 / Issue 02 / May 2003, pp 159 - 172
DOI: 10.1017/S0261143003003106, Published online: 26 June 2003

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143003003106

How to cite this article:
Rebecca Leydon (2003). Ces nymphes, je les veux perptuer: the post-war pastoral in space-age bachelor-pad music.
Popular Music, 22, pp 159-172 doi:10.1017/S0261143003003106
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Popular Music (2003) Volume 22/2. Copyright 2003 Cambridge University Press, pp. 159172.
DOI:10.1017/S0261143003003106 Printed in the United Kingdom

Ces nymphes, je les veux

perpetuer: the post-war pastoral
in space-age bachelor-pad music
R E B E C CA L E Y D O N
Abstract
Juan Garcia Esquivels compositions and band arrangements of the late 1950s and early 1960s his
so-called space-age bachelor pad music feature exotic and futuristic instruments, dazzling stereo
effects, textless vocalisations, and an array of colourful harmonic resources. This paper situates Esquivels music within the venerable tradition of the Pastoral mode, a specialised narrative mode met in
certain literary and musical works. I begin with an account of the musical pastoral, illustrated with
reference to Renaissance madrigals, opera libretti, and especially French concert music from the turn
of the twentieth century. In the music of impressionist composers, pastoral conventions include a
preponderance of slithery sounds such as tremolo, trills, glissandi, gauzy timbres, colouristic harmonies and, especially, an over-abundance of motivic material. The steady parade of new themes, with
little repetition, and rapidly changing orchestral colours impart a hedonistic atmosphere, consistent
with the fantasy of plenitude associated with the literary Pastoral. Esquivels music, I claim, represents a transposition of this bucolic style, in which the ephemeral sounds of the ute and harp are
transformed into their space-age counterparts: theremin, vibraphone, buzzimba, and the zu-zu-zu of
the Randy Van Horne Singers. Esquivels music, I argue, reconstitutes the particular erotic congurations of classic pastoral: in place of fauns and nymphs are suave bachelors and their dates. The paper
concludes with a discussion of representations of the leisurely bachelor in other contemporaneous
media.

The fantasy of a golden Arcadia peopled with frolicking nymphs and shepherds
originates with the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, and has served as
a recurring theme in literature, painting and music for centuries. This article considers the pastoral mode as a particular subspecies of musical exoticism, associated
with a particular set of sonic signiers. In the rst part of the paper I sketch out
characteristics of this pastoral fantasy as it is understood in some recent literary
scholarship and I discuss how it has historically been encountered in music. In
particular, I focus on French concert music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, where pastoral themes were particularly in vogue. In the second part of
the paper I turn to the music of Juan Garcia Esquivel, the principal artist associated
with the genre known as space-age bachelor pad music.1 I want to argue that this
American instrumental pop of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era takes over the pastoral
lyricism of impressionist music. This impressionistic quality reveals itself most
clearly in Esquivels characteristic harmonic vocabulary and his treatment of instrumental timbres. Moreover, Esquivels music reconstitutes particular aspects of the
pastoral fantasy itself a utopian fantasy of plenitude and innite renewal. Finally,
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Rebecca Leydon

I want to suggest some ways that this music ties in with broader representations of
the leisurely bachelor that we nd in mass media of the same time period.
With their rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature, Renaissance
poets began modelling their own work on that of the Roman epic poet Virgil, whose
Eclogues became a favourite classical reference. The Renaissance pastoral lyric is
easily recognised by its idyllic tone and its array of stock characters: nymphs, fauns
and shepherdesses with melliuous names like Filli, Lilla, Amarilli and Silvio. The
principal gure is that of the shepherd who enacts certain well-dened dramatic
roles, especially that of poet and of lover.
Pastoral poetry typically presents a highly stylised nature setting: sporting
shepherds move about in a remote, idealised natural landscape, wholly free of any
serious physical threats. Often present are lengthy descriptions of woods, hills,
rivers, meadows descriptions in which nature is depicted as an inventory of
benign attributes. Related to this is an emphasis on sensuality, leisure and plenitude; the varied pleasures of nature, wine, love and music are enjoyed in abundance
by the throng of pastoral personae. These themes of festivity are perhaps most
familiar to musicians from the work of Italian Renaissance madrigalists. A favourite
pastoral text, set to music in the sixteenth century by Luca Marenzio, among others,
reads:
Ecco piu che mai bella e vaga laura,
Pastor le vostre Ninfe risuegliate,
Cheel giorna gia sinaura
Ecco chella di frone dherbe e ori
Vi da varij colori
Tessete ghirlandette sl crin ornate
Damate Pastorelle . . .
[Behold, the dawn prettier and sweeter than ever. Shepherds, awaken your nymphs. The
day is beginning already: behold her, giving you various colours in branches, grass and
owers. Weave garlands and adorn the hair of your beloved shepherdesses. . .]

Absolutely typical of the pastoral idiom here are the stylised nature setting, the
naive tone, the litany of natures bounty, and the throng of happy lovers.
The historian Sukanta Chaudhuri has argued that the pastoral mode has to
do with working out a special relationship between urban and rural, between
court and country.2 That relationship, Chaudhuri argues, becomes increasingly
complicated with the rise of modern European cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similarly, Raymond Williams in his study The Country and the City
views the cultivated navete of the pastoral as a fantasised vehicle for urban values.3
Other scholars have pointed out that this pastoral fantasy is, more specically, a
fantasy of plenitude. Thomas Rosenmeyer, for example, argues that the pastoral
mode, from its Renaissance incarnations onward, is essentially hedonistic, characterised by an Epicurean acceptance of the present.4 From Guarinis Il Pastor Fido
to Mallarmes LApre`s-Midi dun Faune, all pastoral personae are engaged in activities that are essentially non-utilitarian.
Rosenmeyers understanding of the pastoral, then, centres around the contrast
between the bucolic and the heroic: while heroic narrative strategies are goal-oriented
and transformational, bucolic ones are static, circular and moment-oriented. In the
pastoral mode, this revelling in the present moment is made possible and is sustained by a continuous outpouring of natures plenitude. As narrative trends evolve

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throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the heroic

strategy that comes to dominate literary genres. Since a bucolic tone can only be
maintained at the expense of the kind of volitional agency that is expected of characters in stories, the pastoral idiom comes to appear as something fragile, precarious,
trivial, and, consequently, inappropriate for the realisation a proper masculine
European subject.
If the heroic narrative largely displaces the bucolic in literary genres of the
modern period, the pastoral mode continues to thrive in music. Geoffrey Chew has
documented the history of pastoral conventions in music, beginning with the
elegant entertainments of Italian courts and academies in the late sixteenth century
that mark the inception of opera.5 Opera subsequently retains strong ties to the
pastoral mode throughout its history. Even with the shift in the seventeenth century
toward opera seria and opera buffa,6 Chew notes that the use of pastoral oases . . .
became part of the opera composers stock in trade, and continued to provide a
distinctive, affective colouring for the sake of variety nested within otherwise heroic plots.7 Instrumental music of this period, as well, intermittently deals with pastoral themes. Even Beethoven, the archetype of heroicism, occasionally indulges in
pastoral depiction, most famously in his sixth symphony The Pastoral which
has all the hallmarks of the idiom: the stylised nature setting, the inventory of
bird-calls, the throng of revellers. In this work the static temporality so typical of
the pastoral mode is captured through Beethovens choice of harmonic resources;
Chew attributes the pastoral quality of the work to an avoidance of the dynamic
drive often associated with the tonal design of Beethovens forms, resulting from
an unusual emphasis within the formal scheme on the subdominant and to the
adoption of a generally slow harmonic rhythm. Richard Taruskin cites this work
as an example of what he calls suspended animation, an effect produced by a
sequence of mediant relationships in the tonal organisation in the rst movement:
The circle of thirds is an island of mysterious repose that interrupts the forward
thrust of the fths progression. Its quality of time is static rather that active.8
Equal divisions of the octave including mediant and whole-tone relationships are, of course, hallmarks of a more generalised chromatic idiom in the nineteenth century. But in certain cases they can be understood more specically as
pastoral conventions, especially when we meet these harmonic resources in conjunction with particular timbres. Certain orchestral instruments have long had
explicit pastoral associations. In the orchestration treatise of Berlioz, for example,
we nd that he ascribes a pastoral quality to the harp, the ute, the oboe, and
certain percussion instruments. His descriptive accounts of orchestral resources in
his Treatise on Instrumentation include these colourful passages:
The oboe, is above all a melodic instrument: it has a pastoral character, full of tenderness
I might even say shyness . . . A certain degree of excitement is also within its power, [but]
one must guard against fury, menace, or heroism: for then its small voice . . . becomes ineffectual and completely grotesque.
...
[The timbre] of the high bells is particularly suited for . . . pastoral scenes.
...
Nothing can be more in keeping with ideas of supernatural splendour or of religious rites
than the tones of a great number of harps, ingeniously employed . . . The strings of the
highest octave have a lovely crystalline tone of voluptuous freshness, able to paint pictures
of fairy-like delicacy and to whisper delicate secrets with lovely melodies.9

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Rebecca Leydon

Berlioz is just one example of a number of composers in France in the nineteenth century who developed the pastoral mode to a sophisticated new level.10 His
more complex approach is partly connected to the French tradition of pastoral
parody, a comedic practice that culminates in works like Offenbachs Orphee aux
enfers (1858). Chew designates this style as the new soft Mediterranean pastoral
idiom, and it is this richer French tradition that much of Claude Debussys music
engages.11 Pastoral themes occupied Debussy throughout his career, beginning with
his early settings of De Banvilles Triomphe de Bacchus and Dianne au bois.
David Code has explored Debussys use of pastoral conventions in his study of the
relationships among the work of Debussy, Mallarme, and the painter Matisse, all
of whom, Code argues, draw upon the devices of the pastoral mode as a way to
stimulate new modes of reading, listening and looking through invocations of multiple idealised pasts.12 Code focuses on what is probably the best-known example
of Debussys treatment of a pastoral subject, the Prelude a` lapre`s-midi dun faune, in
which the composer sought to capture the essence of Mallarmes erotic Eclogue in
a textless orchestral work. To that end, Debussy employs the repertoire of musical
codes that listeners will correctly interpret as pastoral references. The prominent
use of the harp, the sinuous chromatic melody at the opening, the use of whole-tone
and pentatonic sonorities all are employed to depict Mallarmes images of stasis
and languid sensuality. The foregrounding of an unconventional timbre, the solo
ute, within the orchestral fabric marks the work as exotic and antique. As William
Austin remarks:
Faune changed the very character of the ute as an orchestral instrument. From music of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we can still think of the ute as a fe, a whistle, a uttery
and bird-like personage . . . but from Debussy and his successors we know it as sultry,
smouldering with pagan dreams.13

As for the form of the prelude, Austin and others have noted that it does not play
out any traditional techniques of development as such, but rather presents a continuous parade of new motivic ideas and orchestral combinations, with little overt
repetition. The implication is that this pastoral world is somehow innitely renewable, and the prelude enacts the fantasy of plenitude expressed in Mallarmes text
the Fauns fantasy of the menage a trois with the two eshy nymphs:
Ces nymphes, je les veux perpetuer.
Si clair
Leur incarnat leger, quil voltige dans lair
Assoupi de sommeils touffus.
[Those nymphs, I want to make them permanent. So clear their light esh-pink, it hovers
on the atmosphere, oppressed by bushy sleeps.]

Debussys ongoing preoccupation with the erotic aspects of the pastoral continues well into his later career: the Syrinx for solo ute and the Sonata for Flute
Viola and Harp are two late examples. I would argue that the late orchestral work
Jeux (1913) could also be considered in this category. Lawrence Berman has
remarked upon the similarities between Jeux and Faun, claiming that Jeux may be
understood as a second, more successful rendering of the Mallarme poem upon
which Faun is based.14 The two works share common narrative elements, such as
the theme of pursuit, and especially, the menage a trois: the role of the Faun and the
two Nymphs in the Prelude map onto the man and the two women playing tennis
in the later work. It follows that we might imagine Jeux as a kind of Modernist

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version of the pastoral scene, with the mythological characters transformed into
modern-day counterparts that is, athletes in tennis clothes carrying tennis rackets.
Furthermore, what Jeux retains, and indeed amplies, from the earlier Prelude is
precisely its quality of over-abundance: Debussy never pauses to deliberate over the
logical developmental consequences of themes, but rather rushes headlong into ever
new and varied material. Consequently, scholars have frequently singled out Jeux
for its exceptional lack of formal denition its amorphousness but I prefer to
consider the form of this piece in terms of an over-abundance of materials, a kind
of hedonistic approach to both the formal layout of the work and the orchestral
combinations.
That Jeux might be considered as a modernist pastoral lyric suggests that we
could look for other modern retellings of pastoral narrative in the twentieth century.
But with the advent of Modernism and atonality, high-art musical practices largely
abandon references to the pastoral mode, albeit in favour of the related theme of
Primitivism. Meanwhile, however, the pastoral mode seems to gain a foothold in
popular musical styles. American country music, for example, adopts some of its
traits, such as an emphasis on pentatonicism and an expressed nostalgia for idealised Arcadian origins; and the rich harmonic vocabulary of Debussy and his contemporaries is frequently adopted by Hollywood lm composers. Much closer to
the spirit of the soft Mediterranean pastoral, however, are the unmistakable
impressionistic allusions that gure in much of the American instrumental pop
music of the 1950s and early 1960s the ubiquitous pop string-orchestras lead by
musicians such as Mantovanni and Ethel Gabriel, as well as the music of popular
exoticists like Les Baxter. One gure who stands out in this period is Juan Garcia
Esquivel, a musician who adopts many aspects of the n-de-sie`cle pastoral, including
its harmonic language, its lyricism, and, above all, its quality of over-abundance.15
Esquivel was a pianist and self-taught composer and arranger, born in Mexico
in 1918. His formal education at the University of Mexico was in the school of
engineering, but he soon found employment at the popular Mexico-city radio
station XEW where he was responsible for composing advertising jingles, producing the sound tracks for live broadcasts, and directing the studio orchestra. In 1958,
Esquivel moved to Hollywood to record his rst album for RCA, Other Worlds,
Other Sounds. In a 1994 interview,16 Esquivel recounts how he was granted only ve
hours of studio time to record the whole album. Yet he had anticipated every detail
of the recording process with such acumen that he was able to complete the task in
three-and-one-half hours, and then make use of the remaining time to rehearse and
record an entire second album with a small combo (piano, bass, guitar, ute and
Latin percussion, released as The Four Corners of the World). Not only was the Other
Worlds, Other Sounds project completed with astonishing speed and efciency, but
the album was subsequently nominated for two Grammy awards in 1958, in the
categories best orchestra, and best engineered non-classical record. (In the latter
category, Esquivel lost out to David Sevilles The Chipmunk Song.)
Esquivel had similar success with his subsequent albums: Strings Aame and
Innity in Sound were both nominated for Grammy awards in 1959 and 1960,
respectively. With Latin-esque, released in 1962 as part of RCAs Stereo Action
series, Esquivel was able to employ the very latest in stereo audio-engineering techniques. The album made use of two orchestras, recorded simultaneously in separate
studios and synchronised via an elaborate system of click-tracks and closed-circuit
televisions. Esquivel is best known today for the dazzling stereo effects on this and

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Rebecca Leydon

subsequent recordings, and also for his television soundtracks in the 1970s
(including incidental music used for episodes of Kojak, Magnum PI and Charlies
Angels). But in the course of his busy composing and arranging schedule he managed simultaneously to maintain an active performing career: his light-, music- and
dance-spectacle The Sights and Sounds of Esquivel! ran at the Stardust Hotel in
Las Vegas each season between 1962 and 1974. The enduring popularity of Esquivels live show owed much to its coordinated light-and-sound effects, and to the
performances of its four women singers, each representing a different nationality:
Japanese Nana Sumi, Swiss Della Lee (an accomplished yodeller), French Yvonne
De Bourbon, and Greek Jashmira. The group performed in the Star Dusts lounge
adjacent to the room housing the Lido de Paris.
Esquivels music, along with much of the American instrumental pop of this
era, has an afnity with French Impressionist music; Debussys bucolic style, with
its ephemeral utes and harps, nds a space-age counterpart in the sounds of Esquivels orchestra: exotic and futuristic instruments such as the theremin, the ondioline,
the bass accordion and the buzzimba are some of the more unusual sounds in
Esquivels arsenal sounds which are conspicuously showy in a way analogous
to the solo woodwinds within a traditional orchestral texture. Especially prominent
on Esquivels albums is the textless vocalisation provided by a mixed chorus the
Randy Van Horne singers, perhaps best known for their work on the theme song
for The Jetsons. But while Esquivels music is certainly futuristic, incorporating
all of the newest audio engineering techniques of its day, it nevertheless recalls
certain antique aspects of the pastoral idiom. In Esquivels harmonic resources,
especially, we often nd that quality of suspended animation, the static temporality associated with mediant relations, whole-tone sonorities, and the like, in combination with a particular set of signifying timbres. A striking illustration of the
harmonic vocabulary that Esquivel employs is his arrangement of Antonio Carlos
Jobims Surfboard, found on The Genius of Esquivel released in 1967. An excerpt is
given in Example 1. The piece features moments of harmonic planing (where all
voices in the texture move in simultaneous parallel motion) and the juxtaposition
of dominant-7th chords separated by a tritone both classic impressionistic techniques. Meanwhile, an elaborate polyrhythmic structure obscures the rhythmic
alignment of the bass and soprano, which serves to create a sense of weightlessness
in the music a sensation of oating, or rather, surng. More explicitly pastoral
here is Esquivels orchestration. In particular, the use of the textless vocalisation in
Surfboard recalls the same technique in works such as Debussys Sire`nes and Ravels Daphnis and Chloe. Indeed, the sound of the shadow chorus (typically intoning
nonsense phonemes, such as zu-zu-zu-zu) was to become a trademark of Esquivels style, and much imitated by other instrumental pop ensembles of the period.
Esquivels rendition of Snowfall on More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds features harp, utes playing in the low register, and rolled chords in the high register
of the piano. The pentatonicism and the half-diminished-seventh chords in the
opening section, shown in Example 2, strongly suggest a link with Debussys harmonic vocabulary and orchestral conception.
Beyond matters of pitch resources and orchestration, what Esquivel shares
with the soft Mediterranean pastoral of the French impressionists is the familiar
theme of over-abundance: Esquivels music features what he calls the sonorama
style, an effect achieved by means of a profusion of orchestral colours and thematic
materials, and sudden and frequent shifts from one sound source to another.17 This

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Example 1. Excerpt from Surfboard.

generosity of timbres is matched by an equally extravagant approach to sound

spatialisation, as the stereo effects on the title track of Latinesque demonstrate. One
of Esquivels own compositions, it begins with a series of xylophone glissandi
which pan back and forth from channel to channel. A descending scalar ourish
rst introduced in the piano, shown in Example 3, begins to appear in other instruments the accordion, the organ, and in the high register of the piano. These decorative elements seem to burgeon forth in a profusion of slithery sounds.
Esquivels music frequently enacts the theme of over-abundance in its tendency to foreground the inessential components of the texture. A typical Esquivel
arrangement emphasises the accompanimental gures over the theme proper, so
that the original melody is continually awash in extraneous sound effects. This
clouding of the theme proper recalls Debussys reluctance to grant coherent
themes as such, any independent existence. The effect can be heard in the extravagantly decorative function of the brass section and piano ligree that close off his
arrangement of I Get a Kick out of You, from More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds

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Example 2. Excerpt from Snowfall.

(1962). Note in this arrangement, too, one of Esquivels favourite devices: the sparing use of a brief bit of sung text here the title phrase, I get a kick out of you
placed discretely at the very end of a piece. This touch is reminiscent of the understated titles that appear at the end of the Debussys piano Preludes, framed with
enigmatic ellipses e.g. . . . La lle aux cheveux de lin.
It is easy to hear in this music and in that of Esquivels contemporaries like
Les Baxter and Martin Denny how the pastoral fantasy interacts with contemporary ctions of the tropics. The particular fusion of the Mediterranean pastoral with
Latin American musical styles is partly connected with Spanish impressionism
largely an invention of late-nineteenth-century French composers (like Bizet), and
subsequently disseminated abroad via Manuel de Falla, Heitor Villalobos, Darius
Milhaud, and Gustavo E. Campa. As an heir to this tradition, Esquivel likewise
creates a wonderful fusion of Latin dance rhythms and impressionistic harmonic
devices, all the while cultivating a style rmly grounded in the American jazz-band
tradition. All of these styles, and more, merge in Esquivels sparkling arrangement
of The Breeze and I on More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds, a work which also
highlights his penchant for over-the-top endings. The splashy nale of this arrangement positively overows with closural gestures, as do the concluding passages of
Chant to the Night, Street of Dreams and La Mantilla from the same album. In

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Example 3. Excerpt from Latinesque.

each of these works the nal cadential gestures are drawn out and reiterated almost
to the point of absurdity. Such overstated conclusions, paradoxically, undermine
the sense of real closure: it is as if the music could go on and on innitely renewing
itself, luxuriating over the same affect, enacting the Epicurean acceptance of the
present.
A different sort of ending occurs in Esquivels arrangement of Sentimental
Journey, on Innity in Sound (1960). Here, the nal strain of the melody is given to
the brass section. The theme is worked up into a massive texture of blaring trumpets
and thundering percussion. Yet at the expected climactic moment of the nal
phrase, the entire ensemble suddenly retreats, leaving only the slide guitar. The
piece ends with the sound of tom-toms, Muzzy Marcellinos whistling, and a celeste
playing delicate harmonies of uncertain tonal afliation. I interpret this moment as
a retreat from the heroic tone back to the bucolic: like Berliozs oboe, Esquivels
orchestra is capable of a certain degree of excitement, but never ventures into
menace or fury. Esquivel employs fortissimo only sparingly, dotting his pastoral
landscapes with colourful festive touches.18
The idyllic tone of this music its sheer optimism invites the listener to
indulge in a fantasy of plenitude, as listeners are themselves transformed into pastoral personae or at least their Kennedy-era counterparts: space-age bachelors and
their dates. After all, one of the main functions for these stereo recordings of the late
1950s and 1960s was to create amorous ambience within a bachelor pad. Targeted at
audiophiles, Esquivels recordings especially appealed to suburban male consumers
eager to show off their hi- equipment. Esquivels music, I believe, is closely tied
to the particular representations of bachelorhood constructed in mass media during
the same period. In its most distilled form, the image of the leisurely bachelor
appears throughout the early issues of Playboy magazine, from the 1950s and early
1960s. During this period, Playboy seems to offer its readers some of the same kinds

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of bucolic pastoral fantasies that, I claim, are served up in Esquivels impressionistic music.
In 1958, LeRoy Neiman began a monthly feature for Playboy called Man At
His Leisure. Introduced to the Playboy readership as an impressionist painter,
Neiman often drew upon Mediterranean themes, providing soft-focus illustrations
of the French Riviera, the Grand Prix auto race in Monaco, and the regatta of gondoliers in Venice. Such images strengthened the associations already forged between
the Playboy aesthetic and an imagined Mediterranean playground. More specically, there is a particular mystique attached to French subjects. In fact, the whole
practice of American cheese-cake portraiture exemplied in (pre-70s) Playboy has
its roots in n-de-sie`cle Paris, with the posters designed by Jules Cheret and Henri
Toulouse-Lautrec for the Folies Berge`res and the Moulin Rouge. A more proximate
antecedent is Raphael Kirchners pin-ups for La Vie Parisienne in the 1920s and
1930s, which served as models for the work of George Petty, Alberto Vargas, and
Gil Elvgren in Esquire and Playboy. The construction of the erotic imaginary of the
American post-war leisurely bachelor is closely bound up with the semiotics of
n-de-sie`cle Frenchness. We nd this in the images in mens magazines just as we
nd it in the sounds of American instrumental pop of the same era.19
What I nd especially interesting about the representations of bachelorhood
in the early issues of Playboy is a palpable tension between the two incompatible
modes of the bucolic and the heroic. Not only is the reader invited to overindulge
in leisure and sensuality, but at the same time he is supposed to be in control of
himself and the women around him. It is the earlier issues of the magazine that
most clearly seem to offer a kind of refuge for bucolic indulgence, while later issues
increasingly defer to the more heroic modes of representation. The shift can be
traced in a series of advertisements that runs in each of the issues of Playboy, displaying the caption: What Sort of Man Reads Playboy? The purpose of these ads
is to alert potential advertisers to the demographic of the readership; statistics about
the typical readers regularly appear at the bottom of the page, stating average
incomes, education levels, and so on. The ads construct an ideal persona that
appeals both to the reader, who responds positively to the reected image of himself, and to the advertisers who can tailor their own ads to this ideal consumer. In
each of these encapsulations of the fantasised image of the leisurely bachelor, we
nd, almost without exception, the fantasy of the menage a trois a man and two
women. The man is pictured in some leisurely occupation playing tennis, selecting
a ne wine, purchasing a tie (or, in one rather strange example, watching a portable
television on the beach). In most cases, two women also appear in the image: typically, one engages in a conversation with the fellow, while a second, slightly out of
focus in the background, directs her admiring gaze at the man from afar. With
increasing frequency through the 1960s, however, the ads begin to depict the man
as earnestly engaged in some sort of technological activity: he appears as a scientist
in a laboratory, or as a pilot, for instance. By the late 1960s, references to the frivolous pursuits of the leisurely male no longer seem appropriate to the construction
of the sort of man who reads Playboy, and the magazine seems far less engaged
with the elements of the bucolic fantasy. The image of the self-indulgent space-age
bachelor begins to be replaced by other images: James Bond, for example (although
Ian Flemings stories began running in issues as early as 1960) and, eventually, edgy
rock n roll stars become the dominant references in these pictures, in a decided

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Figure 1. Dedini cartoon: Youve had enough. Reproduced by special permission of Playboy magazine: Copyright 1961, 1989 by Playboy.

shift towards the heroic mode. There is a point beyond which the men pictured in
these images actually stop smiling.
Explicit pastoral references persist for some time in Playboy, however, in the
form of a long-running serial cartoon by Eldon Dedini that depicts frolicking
nymphs and satyrs and fauns of classical antiquity in various humourous and
risque situations. Each of the single-panel cartoons features the faun as a recurring
character; Figure 1 shows an example. One particularly telling cartoon, shown in
Figure 2, depicts the usual faun character on vacation for the holidays, visiting his
big-city cousin, another faun almost identical to the rst but attired in a tuxedo,
sipping a martini in his penthouse apartment, and surrounded by stylishly quaffed
female mythological personae in fashionable cocktail dresses.20 If the pastoral mode
functions as a space in which to re-imagine relationships between urban and rural,
then this image of the country cousin faun visiting the city faun shows how these

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Rebecca Leydon

Figure 2. Dedini cartoon: Its become traditional. During the holidays the country cousin visits the
city cousin. Reproduced by special permission of Playboy magazine: Copyright 1967, 1995 by
Playboy.

antique pastoral personae can be directly mapped onto the gure of the modern
urban bachelor.
Esquivel and his musical contemporaries occupy a precarious position in
historical accounts of twentieth-century music, where their space-age bachelorpad music appears as a superuous afterthought of the big-band era, destined
to disappear completely in the coming years with the onslaught of rock n roll
and the British invasion. For baby-boomers coming of age in the 1960s, Esquivels
impressionism is parents music, banished to the outmoded arenas of Vegas
cocktail lounges and supermarket muzak broadcasts. The musical style, along
with the fantasy of over-indulgent leisurely bachelorhood, grows more dissonant
with competing images of heroic masculinity, especially in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the past decade, however, a new audience has rediscovered the instrumental
pop of the late 1950s, and the swanky cocktail aesthetic that it represents, and
Esquivel has emerged as the most admired among the proponents of this musical
style. Much of his work has now been reissued on CD, a movie of Esquivels

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171

life is reported to be in process (directed by Alexander Payne and starring Jon

Leguizamo), and the renowned Kronos Quartet is recording a new arrangement
of one of Esquivels quirky numbers, Mini-skirt (on a CD featuring Mexican
composers). These developments indicate that the popular appetite for bucolic
lyricism and sheer musical abundance, which seems to have persisted since the
sixteenth century, remains undiminished. And perhaps the revival of this style
has also spurred a revaluation of musical narratives of heroic masculinity and a
corresponding awareness of a wider range of alternatives or at least those
bucolic masculinities that were possible, briey, in the United States of Americas
post-war consumer paradise.

Copyright acknowledgements
Excerpt from Snowfall used by permission of the Mutual Music Society. Excerpt
from Surfboard used by permission of the Ipanema Music Corp.

Endnotes
1. According to Irwin Chusid the term was
coined in the 1980s by Brian Werner, a Los
Angeles artist. See Chusids liner notes for
Esquivel! Space-age Bachelor Pad Music.
2. Chaudhuri (1989). See also Haber (1994) and
Patterson (1987).
3. Williams (1973).
4. Rosenmeyer (1969).
5. Chew (2001).
6. The terms opera seria and opera buffa denote
eighteenth-century genres of heroic/tragic
opera and comic opera, respectively.
7. Chew (2001).
8. Taruskin (1985).
9. Berlioz (1858).
10. Chew points out Berliozs development of new
pastoral conventions via the use of solo woodwind melodies characterised by irregular arabesques, exemplied in the passages for oboe
and English horn in the third movement of the
Symphonie Fantastique, the Scene in the
Country movement (1830).
11. A set of particular musical devices pioneered
by Debussy serve as hallmarks of impressionism. The idea of music as an invitation to pleasure, and an emphasis on the immediate sensuous qualities of musical sound, led Debussy
and his imitators toward harmonic strategies
which deliberately ignored traditional requirements for the resolution of dissonance: ostinati, unresolved 7th, 9th, 11th and 13th chords,
harmonic planing, octatonic and wholetone
sonorities, modal scales, motivic duplication,
and the extensive use of string tremolo, and of
the sustain pedal in piano music.
12. Code (1999).
13. Austin (1970).

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14. Berman (1980, p. 225).

15. While I am aware of no direct evidence suggesting Esquivel deliberately sought to imitate
Debussy, I want to argue here that certain conspicuous aspects of the impressionistic style
were taken over by Esquivel and his contemporaries because they afforded expression of
leisureliness and indulgence, and that these
expressive devices were newly relevant for
post-war bachelorhood.
16. Vale and Juno (1994, p. 154).
17. These aspects of Esquivels style may be traced
to his former career in radio: qualities of intermittency and concision, required of cues in
radio dramas and advertising jingles, translated into the zing! and pow! in Esquivels
later sonorama arrangements. The fragmentary quality that I am identifying as
impressionistic in Esquivels music, then, is
probably partly connected with the technological constraints of radio. At the same time, one
reason that the sonorama style works is that
it closely resembles a historical antecedent
characterised by similar features and concerned with similar expressive aims.
18. Esquivel reports that special care had to be
taken with the volume levels in his arrangements for the Sights and Sounds of Esquivel!
group: The job at the Stardust was difcult,
because I was performing in a lounge near the
poker, blackjack and roulette tables. The main
room housed the Lido de Paris show, and we
had to be interesting enough to attract the
crowd that was leaving, but quiet enough to
not distract the poker players! Even though we
couldnt play loud, we had to attract the attention of the people: hey here we are! It was

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Rebecca Leydon

a challenge. See his interview in Vale and

Juno (1994).
19. Interestingly, an alignment with Frenchness is
also characteristic of the musical aesthetics of
gay modernists, such as Ned Rorem, as Nadine
Hubbs has pointed out in her recent article,
Modernist codes and the musical closet, in

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 6/

3 (2000). The gay modernists, in staking their
music to French ideals, reclaimed qualities of
music elsewhere rejected as feminine, and
opposed the patriarchal authority of canonic
musical Germanness (Hubbs, p. 403).
20. Playboy, January 1969, p. 201.

References
Austin, W. 1970. Norton Critical Scores: Debussy, Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun (New York: Norton)
Berlioz, H. 1858. Grand traite dinstrumentation et dorchestration (Boston: Oliver Ditson)
Berman, L. 1980. Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Jeux: Debussys Summer Rites, in Nineteenth
Century Music, 3/3
Chaudhuri, S. Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
Chew, G. 2001. Pastoral, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie, on-line edition,
http://www.grovemusic.com
Chusid, I. 1994. Liner notes for Esquivel! Space-age Bachelor Pad Music, Bar/None Records AHAON 043
Code, D. 1999. A Song Not Purely His Own: Modernism and the Pastoral Mode in Mallarme, Debussy and
Matisse, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
2001. Hearing Debussy reading Mallarme: Music apre`s Wagner in the Prelude a` lapre`s-midi dun faune,
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 54/3, pp. 493554
Haber, J. 1994. Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Patterson, A. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of California Press)
Rosenmeyer, T.G. 1969. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University
of California Press)
Taruskin, R. 1985. Chernomor to Kaschchei: Harmonic sorcery; or Stravinskys angle, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 38, pp. 72142
Vale, V., and Juno, A. 1994. Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications)
Williams, R. 1973. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press)

Esquivel Discography
To Love Again. RCA Victor LPM 1345. 1957
Four Corners of the World. RCA Victor LSP 1749. 1958
Other Worlds Other Sounds. RCA Victor LSP 1753(stereo); LPM 1753 (mono). 1958
Exploring New Sounds in Hi-Fi. RCA Victor LPM 1978 (mono). 1959
Exploring New Sounds in Stereo. RCA Victor LSP 1978 (stereo). 1959
Strings Aame. RCA Victor LSP 1988 (stereo); LPM 1988 (mono). 1959
Hello Amigos. Songs with the Ames Brothers. RCA Victor LSP 2100. 1960
Innity in Sound, Volumes 1 and 2. RCA Victor LSP 2225, LSP 2296 (stereo); LPM 2225, LPM 2296 (mono).
1960
Latin-esque. RCA Victor LSA 2418 (stereo); LPM 2418 (mono). 1962
More of Other Worlds Other Sounds. Reprise RS-6046. 1962
The Best of Esquivel. RCA Victor LSP 3502 (stereo); LPM 3502 (mono). 1966
The Genius of Esquivel. RCA Victor LSP-3697. 1967
Burbujas. Childrens songs, with Silvia Roche. Profono International/Telediscos PTL-1001. 1979
Esquivel! Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Bar/None Records. AHAON 043 cd. 1994
Music from a Sparkling Planet. Bar/None Records AHAON 056 cd. 1995
Cabaret manana. BMG. 1995
Merry Xmas from the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. Bar/None Records AHAON 083 cd. 1996
See It In Sound. 7N/BMG Special Products. 1999[1960]

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