leydon - ces nymphes, je les veux perptuer - the post-war pastoral in space-age bachelor-pad music

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‘Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer’: 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 perpétuer’: 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. 159–172.

DOI:10.1017/S0261143003003106 Printed in the United Kingdom

‘Ces nymphes, je les veuxperpétuer’: the post-war pastoralin space-age bachelor-pad music

R E B E C C A L E Y D O N

Abstract

Juan Garcia Esquivel’s compositions and band arrangements of the late 1950s and early 1960s – hisso-called ‘space-age bachelor pad music’ – feature exotic and futuristic instruments, dazzling stereoeffects, textless vocalisations, and an array of colourful harmonic resources. This paper situates Esqui-vel’s music within the venerable tradition of the Pastoral mode, a specialised narrative mode met incertain literary and musical works. I begin with an account of the musical pastoral, illustrated withreference to Renaissance madrigals, opera libretti, and especially French concert music from the turnof the twentieth century. In the music of ‘impressionist’ composers, pastoral conventions include apreponderance of ‘slithery’ sounds such as tremolo, trills, glissandi, gauzy timbres, colouristic har-monies and, especially, an over-abundance of motivic material. The steady parade of new themes, withlittle repetition, and rapidly changing orchestral colours impart a hedonistic atmosphere, consistentwith the ‘fantasy of plenitude’ associated with the literary Pastoral. Esquivel’s music, I claim, rep-

resents a transposition of this bucolic style, in which the ephemeral sounds of the flute and harp aretransformed into their space-age counterparts: theremin, vibraphone, buzzimba, and the ‘zu-zu-zu’ of the Randy Van Horne Singers. Esquivel’s music, I argue, reconstitutes the particular erotic configur-ations of classic pastoral: in place of fauns and nymphs are suave bachelors and their dates. The paperconcludes with a discussion of representations of the ‘leisurely bachelor’ in other contemporaneousmedia.

The fantasy of a golden Arcadia peopled with frolicking nymphs and shepherdsoriginates with the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, and has served asa recurring theme in literature, painting and music for centuries. This article con-siders the ‘pastoral mode’ as a particular subspecies of musical exoticism, associatedwith a particular set of sonic signifiers. In the first part of the paper I sketch out

characteristics of this pastoral fantasy as it is understood in some recent literaryscholarship and I discuss how it has historically been encountered in music. Inparticular, I focus on French concert music of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, 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 associatedwith the genre known as ‘space-age bachelor pad music’.1 I want to argue that thisAmerican instrumental pop of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era takes over the pastorallyricism of ‘impressionist music’. This impressionistic quality reveals itself mostclearly in Esquivel’s characteristic harmonic vocabulary and his treatment of instru-mental timbres. Moreover, Esquivel’s music reconstitutes particular aspects of thepastoral fantasy itself – a utopian fantasy of plenitude and infinite renewal. Finally,

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Rebecca Leydon160

I want to suggest some ways that this music ties in with broader representations of the ‘leisurely bachelor’ that we find in mass media of the same time period.

With their rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature, Renaissancepoets began modelling their own work on that of the Roman epic poet Virgil, whoseEclogues became a favourite classical reference. The Renaissance pastoral lyric iseasily recognised by its idyllic tone and its array of stock characters: nymphs, faunsand shepherdesses with mellifluous names like Filli, Lilla, Amarilli and Silvio. Theprincipal figure is that of the shepherd who enacts certain well-defined dramaticroles, especially that of poet and of lover.

Pastoral poetry typically presents a highly stylised nature setting: sportingshepherds move about in a remote, idealised natural landscape, wholly free of anyserious 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 pleni-tude; 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 mostfamiliar to musicians from the work of Italian Renaissance madrigalists. A favouritepastoral text, set to music in the sixteenth century by Luca Marenzio, among others,reads:

Ecco piu che mai bella e vaga l’aura,Pastor le vostre Ninfe risuegliate,Che’el giorna gia s’inauraEcco ch’ella di fron’e d’herbe e fioriVi da varij coloriTessete ghirlandette s’l crin ornate

D’amate Pastorelle . . .[Behold, the dawn prettier and sweeter than ever. Shepherds, awaken your nymphs. Theday is beginning already: behold her, giving you various colours in branches, grass andflowers. Weave garlands and adorn the hair of your beloved shepherdesses. . .]

Absolutely typical of the pastoral idiom here are the stylised nature setting, thenaive tone, the litany of nature’s bounty, and the throng of happy lovers.

The historian Sukanta Chaudhuri has argued that the pastoral mode has todo with working out a special relationship between urban and rural, between‘court’ and ‘country’.2 That relationship, Chaudhuri argues, becomes increasinglycomplicated with the rise of modern European cities in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries. Similarly, Raymond Williams in his study The Country and the Cityviews the cultivated naı̈veté of the pastoral as a fantasised vehicle for urban values.3

Other scholars have pointed out that this pastoral fantasy is, more specifically, afantasy of plenitude. Thomas Rosenmeyer, for example, argues that the pastoralmode, from its Renaissance incarnations onward, is essentially hedonistic, charac-terised by ‘an Epicurean acceptance of the present’.4 From Guarini’s Il Pastor Fidoto Mallarmé’s L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, all pastoral personae are engaged in activi-ties that are essentially non-utilitarian.

Rosenmeyer’s understanding of the pastoral, then, centres around the contrast between the bucolic and the heroic: while heroic narrative strategies are goal-orientedand transformational, bucolic ones are static, circular and moment-oriented. In thepastoral mode, this revelling in the present moment is made possible and is sus-tained by a continuous outpouring of nature’s plenitude. As narrative trends evolve




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throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is the heroicstrategy that comes to dominate literary genres. Since a bucolic tone can only bemaintained at the expense of the kind of volitional agency that is expected of charac-ters in stories, the pastoral idiom comes to appear as something fragile, precarious,trivial, and, consequently, inappropriate for the realisation a proper masculineEuropean subject.

If the heroic narrative largely displaces the bucolic in literary genres of themodern period, the pastoral mode continues to thrive in music. Geoffrey Chew hasdocumented the history of pastoral conventions in music, beginning with theelegant entertainments of Italian courts and academies in the late sixteenth centurythat mark the inception of opera.5 Opera subsequently retains strong ties to thepastoral mode throughout its history. Even with the shift in the seventeenth centurytoward 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 ‘adistinctive, affective colouring for the sake of variety’ nested within otherwise ‘her-oic’ plots.7 Instrumental music of this period, as well, intermittently deals with pas-toral themes. Even Beethoven, the archetype of heroicism, occasionally indulges inpastoral depiction, most famously in his sixth symphony – ‘The Pastoral’ – whichhas 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 Beethoven’s choice of harmonic resources;Chew attributes the pastoral quality of the work to ‘an avoidance of the dynamicdrive often associated with the tonal design of Beethoven’s forms’, resulting from‘an unusual emphasis within the formal scheme on the subdominant and to theadoption of a generally slow harmonic rhythm’. Richard Taruskin cites this work

as an example of what he calls ‘suspended animation’, an effect produced by asequence of mediant relationships in the tonal organisation in the first movement:‘The circle of thirds is an island of mysterious repose that interrupts the forwardthrust of the fifths progression. Its quality of time is static rather that active.’8

Equal divisions of the octave – including mediant and whole-tone relation-ships – are, of course, hallmarks of a more generalised chromatic idiom in the nine-teenth century. But in certain cases they can be understood more specifically aspastoral conventions, especially when we meet these harmonic resources in con- junction with particular timbres. Certain orchestral instruments have long hadexplicit pastoral associations. In the orchestration treatise of Berlioz, for example,we find that he ascribes a pastoral quality to the harp, the flute, the oboe, andcertain 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 ineffec-tual 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 ritesthan the tones of a great number of harps, ingeniously employed . . . The strings of thehighest octave have a lovely crystalline tone of voluptuous freshness, able to paint picturesof fairy-like delicacy and to whisper delicate secrets with lovely melodies.9




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Berlioz is just one example of a number of composers in France in the nine-teenth century who developed the pastoral mode to a sophisticated new level.10 Hismore complex approach is partly connected to the French tradition of pastoralparody, a comedic practice that culminates in works like Offenbach’s Orphé e auxenfers (1858). Chew designates this style as ‘the new soft Mediterranean pastoralidiom’, and it is this richer French tradition that much of Claude Debussy’s musicengages.11 Pastoral themes occupied Debussy throughout his career, beginning withhis early settings of De Banville’s ‘Triomphe de Bacchus’ and ‘Dianne au bois’.David Code has explored Debussy’s use of pastoral conventions in his study of therelationships among the work of Debussy, Mallarmé, and the painter Matisse, allof 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 mul-tiple idealised pasts’.12 Code focuses on what is probably the best-known example

of Debussy’s treatment of a pastoral subject, the Pré lude à l’après-midi d’un faune, inwhich the composer sought to capture the essence of Mallarmé’s erotic ‘Eclogue’ ina textless orchestral work. To that end, Debussy employs the repertoire of musicalcodes that listeners will correctly interpret as pastoral references. The prominentuse of the harp, the sinuous chromatic melody at the opening, the use of whole-toneand pentatonic sonorities – all are employed to depict Mallarmé’s images of stasisand languid sensuality. The foregrounding of an unconventional timbre, the soloflute, within the orchestral fabric marks the work as exotic and antique. As WilliamAustin remarks:

Faune changed the very character of the flute as an orchestral instrument. From music of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries we can still think of the flute as a fife, a whistle, a flutteryand 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 playout any traditional techniques of ‘development’ as such, but rather presents a con-tinuous parade of new motivic ideas and orchestral combinations, with little overtrepetition. The implication is that this pastoral world is somehow infinitely renew-able, and the prelude enacts the fantasy of plenitude expressed in Mallarmé’s text –the Faun’s fantasy of the mé nage a trois with the two fleshy nymphs:

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.Si clair

Leur incarnat léger, qu’il voltige dans l’airAssoupi de sommeils touffus.[‘Those nymphs, I want to make them permanent. So clear – their light flesh-pink, it hoverson the atmosphere, oppressed by bushy sleeps.’]

Debussy’s ongoing preoccupation with the erotic aspects of the pastoral con-tinues well into his later career: the Syrinx for solo flute and the Sonata for FluteViola 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 hasremarked upon the similarities between Jeux and Faun, claiming that Jeux may beunderstood as a second, more successful rendering of the Mallarmé poem uponwhich Faun is based.14 The two works share common narrative elements, such asthe theme of pursuit, and especially, the mé nage a trois: the role of the Faun and thetwo Nymphs in the Prelude map onto the man and the two women playing tennisin the later work. It follows that we might imagine Jeux as a kind of Modernist





version of the pastoral scene, with the mythological characters transformed intomodern-day counterparts – that is, athletes in tennis clothes carrying tennis rackets.Furthermore, what Jeux retains, and indeed amplifies, from the earlier Prelude isprecisely its quality of over-abundance: Debussy never pauses to deliberate over thelogical developmental consequences of themes, but rather rushes headlong into evernew and varied material. Consequently, scholars have frequently singled out Jeuxfor its exceptional lack of formal definition – its amorphousness – but I prefer toconsider the form of this piece in terms of an over-abundance of materials, a kindof ‘hedonistic’ approach to both the formal layout of the work and the orchestralcombinations.

That Jeux might be considered as a modernist pastoral lyric suggests that wecould 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 inpopular musical styles. American country music, for example, adopts some of itstraits, such as an emphasis on pentatonicism and an expressed nostalgia for ideal-ised ‘Arcadian’ origins; and the rich harmonic vocabulary of Debussy and his con-temporaries is frequently adopted by Hollywood film composers. Much closer tothe spirit of the ‘soft Mediterranean pastoral’, however, are the unmistakableimpressionistic allusions that figure in much of the American instrumental popmusic of the 1950s and early 1960s – the ubiquitous pop string-orchestras lead bymusicians such as Mantovanni and Ethel Gabriel, as well as the music of popular‘exoticists’ like Les Baxter. One figure who stands out in this period is Juan GarciaEsquivel, a musician who adopts many aspects of the fin-de-siècle pastoral, includingits 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 Mexicoin 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 radiostation XEW where he was responsible for composing advertising jingles, produc-ing the sound tracks for live broadcasts, and directing the studio orchestra. In 1958,Esquivel moved to Hollywood to record his first album for RCA, Other Worlds,Other Sounds. In a 1994 interview,16 Esquivel recounts how he was granted only fivehours of studio time to record the whole album. Yet he had anticipated every detailof the recording process with such acumen that he was able to complete the task inthree-and-one-half hours, and then make use of the remaining time to rehearse andrecord an entire second album with a small combo (piano, bass, guitar, flute andLatin percussion, released as The Four Corners of the World). Not only was the Other

Worlds, Other Sounds project completed with astonishing speed and efficiency, butthe album was subsequently nominated for two Grammy awards in 1958, in thecategories ‘best orchestra’, and ‘best engineered non-classical record’. (In the lattercategory, Esquivel lost out to David Seville’s ‘The Chipmunk Song’.)

Esquivel had similar success with his subsequent albums: Strings Aflame and Infinity in Sound were both nominated for Grammy awards in 1959 and 1960,respectively. With Latin-esque, released in 1962 as part of RCA’s ‘Stereo Action’series, Esquivel was able to employ the very latest in stereo audio-engineering tech-niques. The album made use of two orchestras, recorded simultaneously in separatestudios and synchronised via an elaborate system of click-tracks and closed-circuittelevisions. Esquivel is best known today for the dazzling stereo effects on this and




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subsequent recordings, and also for his television soundtracks in the 1970s(including incidental music used for episodes of Kojak, Magnum PI and Charlie’s Angels). But in the course of his busy composing and arranging schedule he man-aged simultaneously to maintain an active performing career: his light-, music- anddance-spectacle ‘The Sights and Sounds of Esquivel!’ ran at the Stardust Hotel inLas Vegas each season between 1962 and 1974. The enduring popularity of Esquiv-el’s live show owed much to its coordinated light-and-sound effects, and to theperformances of its four women singers, each representing a different nationality: Japanese Nana Sumi, ‘Swiss’ Della Lee (an accomplished yodeller), French YvonneDe Bourbon, and ‘Greek’ Jashmira. The group performed in the Star Dust’s loungeadjacent to the room housing the Lido de Paris.

Esquivel’s music, along with much of the American instrumental pop of thisera, has an affinity with French Impressionist music; Debussy’s bucolic style, with

its ephemeral flutes and harps, finds a space-age counterpart in the sounds of Esqui-vel’s orchestra: exotic and futuristic instruments such as the theremin, the ondioline,the bass accordion and the buzzimba are some of the more unusual sounds inEsquivel’s arsenal – sounds which are conspicuously ‘showy’ in a way analogousto the solo woodwinds within a traditional orchestral texture. Especially prominenton Esquivel’s albums is the textless vocalisation provided by a mixed chorus – theRandy Van Horne singers, perhaps best known for their work on the theme songfor ‘The Jetsons’. But while Esquivel’s music is certainly ‘futuristic’, incorporatingall of the newest audio engineering techniques of its day, it nevertheless recallscertain antique aspects of the pastoral idiom. In Esquivel’s harmonic resources,especially, we often find that quality of suspended animation, the ‘static tempor-ality’ associated with mediant relations, whole-tone sonorities, and the like, in com- bination with a particular set of signifying timbres. A striking illustration of theharmonic vocabulary that Esquivel employs is his arrangement of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Surfboard’, found on The Genius of Esquivel released in 1967. An excerpt isgiven in Example 1. The piece features moments of harmonic ‘planing’ (where allvoices in the texture move in simultaneous parallel motion) and the juxtapositionof dominant-7th chords separated by a tritone – both classic ‘impressionistic’ tech-niques. Meanwhile, an elaborate polyrhythmic structure obscures the rhythmicalignment of the bass and soprano, which serves to create a sense of weightlessnessin the music – a sensation of floating, or rather, ‘surfing’. More explicitly pastoralhere is Esquivel’s orchestration. In particular, the use of the textless vocalisation in‘Surfboard’ recalls the same technique in works such as Debussy’s Sirènes and Rav-el’s Daphnis and Chloe. Indeed, the sound of the shadow chorus (typically intoningnonsense phonemes, such as ‘zu-zu-zu-zu’) was to become a trademark of Esquiv-

el’s style, and much imitated by other instrumental pop ensembles of the period.Esquivel’s rendition of ‘Snowfall’ on More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds fea-

tures harp, flutes playing in the low register, and rolled chords in the high registerof the piano. The pentatonicism and the half-diminished-seventh chords in theopening section, shown in Example 2, strongly suggest a link with Debussy’s har-monic vocabulary and orchestral conception.

Beyond matters of pitch resources and orchestration, what Esquivel shareswith the ‘soft Mediterranean pastoral’ of the French impressionists is the familiartheme of over-abundance: Esquivel’s music features what he calls the ‘sonorama’style, an effect achieved by means of a profusion of orchestral colours and thematicmaterials, and sudden and frequent shifts from one sound source to another. 17 This





Example 1. Excerpt from ‘Surfboard’.

generosity of timbres is matched by an equally extravagant approach to soundspatialisation, as the stereo effects on the title track of Latinesque demonstrate. Oneof Esquivel’s own compositions, it begins with a series of xylophone glissandiwhich pan back and forth from channel to channel. A descending scalar flourish

first introduced in the piano, shown in Example 3, begins to appear in other instru-ments – the accordion, the organ, and in the high register of the piano. These deco-rative elements seem to burgeon forth in a profusion of ‘slithery’ sounds.

Esquivel’s music frequently enacts the theme of ‘over-abundance’ in its tend-ency to foreground the inessential components of the texture. A typical Esquivelarrangement emphasises the accompanimental figures over the ‘theme’ proper, sothat the original melody is continually awash in extraneous sound effects. Thisclouding of the theme proper recalls Debussy’s reluctance to grant coherent‘themes’ as such, any independent existence. The effect can be heard in the extrava-gantly decorative function of the brass section and piano filigree that close off hisarrangement 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 Esquivel’s favourite devices: the spar-ing 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 under-stated titles that appear at the end of the Debussy’s piano Preludes, framed withenigmatic ellipses – e.g. ‘. . . La fille aux cheveux de lin’.

It is easy to hear in this music – and in that of Esquivel’s contemporaries likeLes Baxter and Martin Denny – how the pastoral fantasy interacts with contempor-ary fictions 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), andsubsequently disseminated abroad via Manuel de Falla, Heitor Villalobos, DariusMilhaud, and Gustavo E. Campa. As an heir to this tradition, Esquivel likewisecreates a wonderful fusion of Latin dance rhythms and impressionistic harmonicdevices, all the while cultivating a style firmly grounded in the American jazz-bandtradition. All of these styles, and more, merge in Esquivel’s sparkling arrangementof ‘The Breeze and I’ on More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds, a work which alsohighlights his penchant for over-the-top endings. The splashy finale of this arrange-ment positively overflows with closural gestures, as do the concluding passages of ‘Chant to the Night’, ‘Street of Dreams’ and ‘La Mantilla’ from the same album. In





Example 3. Excerpt from ‘Latinesque’.

each of these works the final cadential gestures are drawn out and reiterated almostto the point of absurdity. Such overstated conclusions, paradoxically, underminethe sense of real closure: it is as if the music could go on and on infinitely renewingitself, luxuriating over the same affect, enacting the Epicurean acceptance of thepresent.

A different sort of ending occurs in Esquivel’s arrangement of ‘Sentimental Journey’, on Infinity in Sound (1960). Here, the final strain of the melody is given tothe brass section. The theme is worked up into a massive texture of blaring trumpetsand thundering percussion. Yet at the expected climactic moment of the finalphrase, the entire ensemble suddenly retreats, leaving only the slide guitar. Thepiece ends with the sound of tom-toms, Muzzy Marcellino’s whistling, and a celesteplaying delicate harmonies of uncertain tonal affiliation. I interpret this moment asa retreat from the heroic tone back to the bucolic: like Berlioz’s oboe, Esquivel’sorchestra is capable of a certain degree of excitement, but never ventures into‘menace or fury’. Esquivel employs fortissimo only sparingly, dotting his pastorallandscapes with colourful festive touches.18

The idyllic tone of this music – its sheer optimism – invites the listener toindulge in a fantasy of plenitude, as listeners are themselves transformed into pasto-ral personae – or at least their Kennedy-era counterparts: space-age bachelors andtheir dates. After all, one of the main functions for these stereo recordings of the late1950s and 1960s was to create amorous ambience within a bachelor pad. Targeted ataudiophiles, Esquivel’s recordings especially appealed to suburban male consumerseager to show off their hi-fi equipment. Esquivel’s music, I believe, is closely tiedto the particular representations of bachelorhood constructed in mass media duringthe 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 early1960s. 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 Esquivel’s ‘impression-istic’ music.

In 1958, LeRoy Neiman began a monthly feature for Playboy called ‘Man AtHis Leisure’. Introduced to the Playboy readership as ‘an impressionist painter’,Neiman often drew upon Mediterranean themes, providing ‘soft-focus’ illustrationsof the French Riviera, the Grand Prix auto race in Monaco, and the regatta of gondo-liers in Venice. Such images strengthened the associations already forged betweenthe Playboy aesthetic and an imagined Mediterranean playground. More specifi-cally, there is a particular mystique attached to French subjects. In fact, the wholepractice of American ‘cheese-cake’ portraiture exemplified in (pre-70s) Playboy hasits roots in fin-de-siècle Paris, with the posters designed by Jules Cheret and HenriToulouse-Lautrec for the Folies Bergères and the Moulin Rouge. A more proximateantecedent is Raphael Kirchner’s ‘pin-ups’ for La Vie Parisienne in the 1920s and

1930s, which served as models for the work of George Petty, Alberto Vargas, andGil Elvgren in Esquire and Playboy. The construction of the erotic imaginary of theAmerican post-war leisurely bachelor is closely bound up with the semiotics of fin-de-siècle ‘Frenchness’. We find this in the images in men’s magazines just as wefind it in the sounds of American instrumental pop of the same era.19

What I find especially interesting about the representations of bachelorhoodin the early issues of Playboy is a palpable tension between the two incompatiblemodes of the ‘bucolic’ and the ‘heroic’. Not only is the reader invited to overindulgein 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 thatmost clearly seem to offer a kind of refuge for bucolic indulgence, while later issuesincreasingly 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, dis-playing the caption: ‘What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?’ The purpose of these adsis to alert potential advertisers to the demographic of the readership; statistics aboutthe typical readers regularly appear at the bottom of the page, stating averageincomes, education levels, and so on. The ads construct an ideal persona thatappeals both to the reader, who responds positively to the reflected image of him-self, and to the advertisers who can tailor their own ads to this ideal consumer. Ineach of these encapsulations of the fantasised image of the leisurely bachelor, wefind, almost without exception, the fantasy of the mé nage a trois – a man and twowomen. The man is pictured in some leisurely occupation – playing tennis, selectinga fine wine, purchasing a tie (or, in one rather strange example, watching a portabletelevision on the beach). In most cases, two women also appear in the image: typi-

cally, 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. Withincreasing frequency through the 1960s, however, the ads begin to depict the manas earnestly engaged in some sort of technological activity: he appears as a scientistin a laboratory, or as a pilot, for instance. By the late 1960s, references to the frivol-ous pursuits of the leisurely male no longer seem appropriate to the constructionof the ‘sort of man who reads Playboy’, and the magazine seems far less engagedwith 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 (althoughIan Fleming’s stories began running in issues as early as 1960) and, eventually, edgyrock ’n’ roll stars become the dominant references in these pictures, in a decided





Figure 1. Dedini cartoon: ‘You’ve 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 inthese images actually stop smiling.

Explicit pastoral references persist for some time in Playboy, however, in theform of a long-running serial cartoon by Eldon Dedini that depicts frolickingnymphs and satyrs and fauns of classical antiquity in various humourous andrisqué situations. Each of the single-panel cartoons features the faun as a recurringcharacter; Figure 1 shows an example. One particularly telling cartoon, shown inFigure 2, depicts the usual faun character on vacation for the holidays, visiting his‘big-city’ cousin, another faun almost identical to the first but attired in a tuxedo,sipping a martini in his penthouse apartment, and surrounded by stylishly quaffedfemale mythological personae in fashionable cocktail dresses.20 If the pastoral modefunctions 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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Figure 2. Dedini cartoon: ‘It’s become traditional. During the holidays the country cousin visits thecity cousin’. Reproduced by special permission of Playboy magazine: Copyright © 1967, 1995 byPlayboy.

antique pastoral personae can be directly mapped onto the figure of the modernurban bachelor.

Esquivel and his musical contemporaries occupy a precarious position inhistorical accounts of twentieth-century music, where their space-age bachelor-

pad music appears as a superfluous afterthought of the big-band era, destinedto disappear completely in the coming years with the onslaught of rock ’n’ rolland the British invasion. For baby-boomers coming of age in the 1960s, Esquivel’simpressionism is ‘parents’ music’, banished to the outmoded arenas of Vegascocktail lounges and supermarket muzak broadcasts. The musical style, alongwith the fantasy of over-indulgent leisurely bachelorhood, grows more dissonantwith competing images of heroic masculinity, especially in the 1970s and 1980s.In the past decade, however, a new audience has rediscovered the instrumentalpop of the late 1950s, and the swanky cocktail aesthetic that it represents, andEsquivel has emerged as the most admired among the proponents of this musicalstyle. Much of his work has now been reissued on CD, a movie of Esquivel’s





life is reported to be in process (directed by Alexander Payne and starring JonLeguizamo), and the renowned Kronos Quartet is recording a new arrangementof one of Esquivel’s quirky numbers, ‘Mini-skirt’ (on a CD featuring Mexicancomposers). These developments indicate that the popular appetite for bucoliclyricism and sheer musical ‘abundance’, which seems to have persisted since thesixteenth century, remains undiminished. And perhaps the revival of this stylehas also spurred a revaluation of musical narratives of heroic masculinity and acorresponding awareness of a wider range of alternatives – or at least those bucolic masculinities that were possible, briefly, in the United States of America’spost-war consumer paradise.

Copyright acknowledgements

Excerpt from ‘Snowfall’ used by permission of the Mutual Music Society. Excerptfrom ‘Surfboard’ used by permission of the Ipanema Music Corp.

Endnotes

1. According to Irwin Chusid the term was 14. Berman (1980, p. 225).coined in the 1980s by Brian Werner, a Los 15. While I am aware of no direct evidence sug-Angeles artist. See Chusid’s liner notes for gesting Esquivel deliberately sought to imitateEsquivel! Space-age Bachelor Pad Music. Debussy, I want to argue here that certain con-

2. Chaudhuri (1989). See also Haber (1994) and spicuous aspects of the impressionistic stylePatterson (1987). were taken over by Esquivel and his contem-

3. Williams (1973). poraries because they afforded expression of 4. Rosenmeyer (1969). ‘leisureliness’ and ‘indulgence’, and that these5. Chew (2001). expressive devices were newly relevant for

6. The terms opera seria and opera buffa denote post-war bachelorhood.eighteenth-century genres of heroic/tragic 16. Vale and Juno (1994, p. 154).opera and comic opera, respectively. 17. These aspects of Esquivel’s style may be traced

7. Chew (2001). to his former career in radio: qualities of inter-8. Taruskin (1985). mittency and concision, required of cues in9. Berlioz (1858). radio dramas and advertising jingles, trans-

10. Chew points out Berlioz’s development of new lated into the ‘zing!’ and ‘pow!’ in Esquivel’spastoral conventions via the use of solo wood- later ‘sonorama’ arrangements. The fragmen-wind melodies characterised by irregular ara- tary quality that I am identifying as besques, exemplified in the passages for oboe ‘impressionistic’ in Esquivel’s music, then, isand English horn in the third movement of the probably partly connected with the technologi-Symphonie Fantastique, the ‘Scene in the cal constraints of radio. At the same time, oneCountry’ movement (1830). reason that the sonorama style ‘works’ is that

11. A set of particular musical devices pioneered it closely resembles a historical antecedent by Debussy serve as hallmarks of impression- characterised by similar features and con-

ism. The idea of music as an invitation to plea- cerned with similar expressive aims.sure, and an emphasis on the immediate sen- 18. Esquivel reports that special care had to besuous qualities of musical sound, led Debussy taken with the volume levels in his arrange-and his imitators toward harmonic strategies ments for the ‘Sights and Sounds of Esquivel!’which deliberately ignored traditional require- group: ‘The job at the Stardust was difficult,ments for the resolution of dissonance: ostin- because I was performing in a lounge near theati, unresolved 7th, 9th, 11th and 13th chords, poker, blackjack and roulette tables. The mainharmonic ‘planing’, octatonic and wholetone room housed the Lido de Paris show, and wesonorities, modal scales, motivic ‘duplication’, had to be interesting enough to attract theand the extensive use of string tremolo, and of crowd that was leaving, but quiet enough tothe sustain pedal in piano music. not distract the poker players! Even though we

12. Code (1999). couldn’t play loud, we had to attract the atten-13. Austin (1970). tion of the people: ‘hey – here we are!’ It was



15/15

Rebecca Leydon172

a challenge’. See his interview in Vale and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 6/

Juno (1994). 3 (2000). ‘The gay modernists, in staking their19. Interestingly, an alignment with ‘Frenchness’ is music to French ideals, reclaimed qualities of

also characteristic of the musical aesthetics of music elsewhere rejected as feminine, andgay modernists, such as Ned Rorem, as Nadine opposed the patriarchal authority of canonicHubbs has pointed out in her recent article, musical Germanness’ (Hubbs, p. 403).‘Modernist codes and the musical closet’, in 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 traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration (Boston: Oliver Ditson)Berman, L. 1980. ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Jeux: Debussy’s Summer Rites’, in Nineteenth

Century Music, 3/3Chaudhuri, 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 043Code, D. 1999. A Song Not Purely His Own: Modernism and the Pastoral Mode in Mallarmé , Debussy and

Matisse, Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley2001. ‘Hearing Debussy reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Pré lude à l’après-midi d’un faune’,

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 54/3, pp. 493–554Haber, J. 1994. Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)Patterson, A. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valé ry (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 Stravinsky’s angle’, Journal of the

American Musicological Society, 38, pp. 72–142Vale, 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. 1958Other Worlds Other Sounds. RCA Victor LSP 1753(stereo); LPM 1753 (mono). 1958Exploring New Sounds in Hi-Fi. RCA Victor LPM 1978 (mono). 1959Exploring New Sounds in Stereo. RCA Victor LSP 1978 (stereo). 1959Strings Aflame. RCA Victor LSP 1988 (stereo); LPM 1988 (mono). 1959 Hello Amigos. Songs with the Ames Brothers. RCA Victor LSP 2100. 1960 Infinity in Sound, Volumes 1 and 2. RCA Victor LSP 2225, LSP 2296 (stereo); LPM 2225, LPM 2296 (mono).

1960Latin-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). 1966The Genius of Esquivel. RCA Victor LSP-3697. 1967Burbujas. Children’s songs, with Silvia Roche. Profono International/Telediscos PTL-1001. 1979Esquivel! Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Bar/None Records. AHAON 043 cd. 1994 Music from a Sparkling Planet. Bar/None Records AHAON 056 cd. 1995Cabaret mañ ana. BMG. 1995 Merry Xmas from the Space-Age Bachelor Pad. Bar/None Records AHAON 083 cd. 1996See It In Sound. 7N/BMG Special Products. 1999[1960]

leydon - ces nymphes, je les veux perptuer - the post-war pastoral in space-age bachelor-pad music

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