On perusing my iTunes library (with acknowledgement to Walter Benjamin and a warning to readers of this blog who do not share my musical obsessions)

Anyone who has an iPod and is a lover of music will be well aware of the pleasures and frustrations of iTunes, Steve Jobs’ gift to humanity and the key to Apple’s change of role from brave David to mighty Goliath.

As a classical music lover, I gave up my old Creative Zen MP3 player with a respectable 64GB of memory for a 160GB iPod Classic some 5 years ago, since when my love-hate relation with iTunes has started.

Today was one of those awful days when I had to move my iTunes library to a different hard drive from the existing one. As anyone who has undertaken this operation knows, it is riven with dangers.

The operation was not without a hitch – I managed to transfer the ‘albums’ but not the various playlists I had created; I also lost all the data on ‘times played’, ‘date added’ and so forth. No matter, the loss is small.

Moving my iTunes library, however, brought to mind Walter Benjamin’s bewitching little essay “Unpacking my Library”, in which he describes his feelings as he peruses his beloved books which are about to find a new home. And this made me look at some of the contents of my iTunes library, or at least what had survived in the move from one hard drive to another. 1757 albums, 1019 artists and 101 genres. 23930 ‘songs’, 81.1 days’ worth of listening and  a whopping 128 GB worth of iPod memory.

This is beginning to sound like Leporello’s catalogue aria from Don Giovanni – so why not? My iTunes library contains 4 versions of this great opera, to my surprise all dating before 1980. This will give you an indication of my reactionary musical tastes! I would rather have Giulini, Fricsay and even the ancient Klemperer at the very end of his days, with their old-fashioned casts, harpsichords and lack of appoggiaturas, than most of today’s star conductors,  with their celebrity singers, period instruments and anxiety-provoking tempi.

And while we are on Mozart, I find in my iTunes library a total of 165 albums with his music, just behind Beethoven (169 albums) and considerably behind Bach (235). Modernists will sneer at my disregard for Stravinsky (2 albums to my shame, very rarely played), Bartok (5) et al. Of the 20^th century composers, there is only one that is truly close to my heart, much as I admire Ravel (11) – Shostakovich (51) is a composer  whose music is rarely far away from my CD player or iPod.

French baroque is a favourite of mine - the great Couperin (29), whose harpsichord music is a constant companion, Rameau (12), Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (my favourite woman composer and a surpassing talent), Marin Marais and others are much loved figures in my iPod library.

And performers? Among violinists there is a spread of Oistrakhs, Heifetzs, Milsteins, Menuhins, Grumiauxs, and others. But among pianists the spread is very uneven. My beloved Rubinstein (10) unsurpassed in Chopin pales (in quantity if not in quality) in comparison to Ashkenazy (32) and Arrau (32), Above all, however, stands that erratic genius, Richter (66), whose music-making never fails to move me (even when he plays Bartok!)

So, is there any meaning in all this? Probably not. More than 90% of the music in my iTunes library was copied from my CD collection, in a piecemeal fashion. If feel like listening to something on my iPod and it is not already there, I add it to the library. Or, I am listening to something on my CD player which gives me great pleasure (as is now Michael Borgstede playing Couperin’s 12^th Ordre); when the CD finishes, I am likely to transfer it to the iTunes library.

But if there is no meaning in such statistics, there is maybe something of value. A record of somebody’s listening habits, which for somebody like me is as important as reading and writing habits. And for this record (much of which disappeared earlier today when I transferred my iTunes library), I must thank Steve Jobs.

There is, however, one more factor that is brought to light by this little exercise. There are plenty of pieces of music that demand many different interpretations, since there are so many different ways to render them. I find this especially with vocal music – this may explain why I have 6 versions of Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and only 1 of his First Symphony. Which opera lover would be satisfied with a single version of Don Carlo or Boris Godunov?