My iTunes Library: A Literal Crisis over Semantics

*I usually include audio for these blogs to listen to while reading, but since this one isn’t about a specific track, here’s an audio clip of an old piece of mine that I’ve “paul-stretched” 8x to create a nice ambient, listening atmosphere. Or just put on your own music.

First off, yes, I do use iTunes as my local music library, and have for about ten years now. I don’t really stream music, and every device I own typically has an SD card in it to house the 1,000+ consecutive hours (~50 consecutive days) of music I have accumulated digitally. Despite my pride in this ongoing project, this is not a brag; it feels more like an admission of guilt. I might also mention I am officially too terrified to update iTunes anymore, especially as Apple weeds it out. This is going to be a weird post…

It goes without saying to anyone that knows me knows that my music library is going to be well-groomed. I take a lot of time (sometimes literally hours per day) to make sure every individual track is correct for each metadata tag I use. Things like Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, etc.

Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s impossible.

Sometimes, when I rip a CD of an Italian opera I like, it’s just a matter of making sure the titles all have the correct spelling. Did they substitute every é or è with a basic “e" instead. Or maybe they used the wrong one, and I have to check what’s correct. Sometimes I see conflicting answers and have to do a bit more digging into the history of a certain word in a foreign language, all for the two minute track that’s one of thirty on one opera CD out of five I’ve checked out that day. Ohimè! Maybe it’s a German title with two consecutive S’s, which in some parts of German-speaking countries becomes a different letter entirely: ß, and I have to check if it should be that instead—typically having to research exactly where in Germany this is from.

Sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with language. Maybe a composer didn’t name movements of a larger symphonic work, what do I call those tracks? Well, sometimes, they offer expression text like “allegro molto” and those are typically substitutes for movement titles. Okay, what if the second half is andante? Allegro molto⁠—andante. But what if there’s three, or four, or five different but extremely distinct sections? Or what if the composer just numbered the movements? Maybe it’s 1 and 2, or maybe it’s I and II. That’s fine, I can put those. But once I came across a score that used a I without a period after, so I had to go back to my library and change “I.” to “I”. But then, of course, how could I not go through every other track in my library I had so carelessly just titled I. with a period and questioned if I should have. Or that maybe Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) were used instead. So then I’m up until 3am trying to find copies of the score online—sometimes less than legally—JUST to know which it is.

Artists aren’t too bad. Except when it’s “classical” music and it feels wrong to put the artist as Ludwig van Beethoven because, in fact, the group playing is the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Easy enough, just go by composer instead. Well, what do I do then for the Cannonball Adderley album Somethin’ Else where they play “Autumn Leaves?” Do I write Joseph Kosma and Johnny Mercer, who originally wrote the song? Or do I consider the fact that about 80% of the track off the Cannonball album is improvisation Kosma & Mercer had nothing to do with, and it’s fair to call Cannonball the composer, too? What about all the other soloists? Solution: call the artist the composer for “classical music,” because after all the one thing that’s almost always true about it is that it was written for other people to play. The performing group goes in the “Comments” section, along with the audio quality written in kb/s.

Album goes right along with artist for the same complications. Is Wagner’s Ring Cycle’s album the CD I got it off of? Or is it Der Ring des Nibelungen? But hold on, he has four operas that are all part of the same larger work, so really the album should be Das Rheingold or Siegfried. But then how do I show that they are all part of a larger collection? Okay: Der Ring des Nibelungen: Das Rheingold or Der Ring des Nibelungen: Götterdämmerung. Of course the problem there is that Götterdämmerung is last in the cycle, but first alphabetically, so I have to go into the “Sort As” tab in each track, and change the album to be read as "Der Ring des Nibelungen: (4) Götterdämmerung for each track of the entire opera, plus doing (3), (2), and (1) for the others so that they will be listed in the correct order. The same thing happens with a pretty big flaw in iTunes that somehow “Piano Sonata No. 8 in F Major” is AFTER “Piano Sonata No. 11" in D Minor” because 8 comes after 1. So I have to go into “Sort As” and call it “Piano Sonata No. 08 in F Major” whilst keeping the original album name as 8, because there’s no way I want to look at Haydn’s Symphony No. 006 in D Major.

This, of course, brings up a big question with album art. For jazz or rock, or my newer ambient/electronic interest this is pretty easy, just use the album art from the record or CD. Most times the digital downloads come with that anyway. But what if it’s a piece for wind ensemble that was recorded and made available, but never on an album? What’s the image? Or for ANY of my “classical” music who I’m listing the artist as Mozart and the album as “Piano Sonata etc.” Do I want the picture from the album showing Ashkenazy at the piano? Not especially. So my grand solution: put a picture of the composer. Oh boy, what a can of worms.

There are no pictures of Claudio Monteverdi. Well, paintings will do. And while some of my earliest composers have really VERY bad portraits, that’s fine, whatever. But what if there is no picture at all of the composer (available online publicly, at least) whatsoever? Say, Heskel Brisman, a Jewish composer who made a piece for wind ensemble in 1973 called “Uganda Lullaby?” Is it wrong, or even cruel, to put the album art as his literal tombstone, because after an hour of searching, it’s the only picture of him online at all?

But, so, here’s where things get really bad:

Is Caroline Shaw a classical composer? Well, she’s written some lovely string quartets, and every other composer I have with quartets has their own image for the album art, again because I’m not so worried about the performing group. But she released them all on a record called “Orange” (which, by the way, is on the coolest bright orange vinyl that looks just like the old Rugrats VHS tapes). And yet still, she has 5 tracks on the album that are part of a larger work called Plan & Elevation. So what’s the album of track 3? Is the art a picture of her or the album art? If I do it for those pieces, do I have to stay consistent with every piece by her? In today’s ever-more increasing blend of genres, where do I draw the line personally of showing the album art as the actual album art and not an image of the composer? Am I segregating music in my own mind into a tradition or not just by choosing album art? Typically I show the album only if the piece isn’t really meant to be performed by others, but what if it does? Do I have to follow the live performances of this piece to inform my choice of album art?

Again, “Year” creates this same divide. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 can’t be 1992, even though that’s when the recording I have was created, so I’ll mark it as 1824. Granted, sometimes the piece was written and then put away for a long time and no one knows when it was actually composed. Or maybe it was revised. Or maybe different movements were composed in different years. Or maybe it was premiered a year after it was finished, in which case which year do you choose? Or maybe it’s Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir and the piece literally didn’t see the light of day until decades after it was written. Or maybe, if you’re especially unlucky, someone like Ben Johnston comes along with two string quartets—Numbers 3 and 4—that were composed in 1966 and 1973, respectively, but that upon hearing the two, the composer Ben Johnston himself chose to have a minute and forty-three seconds of silence between the two quartets when played consecutively, which he now thinks is fitting and refers to the larger work as “Crossings,” (This is only on a specific CD release, by the way). So now we have a literal minute of silence on the CD, as its own track aptly called “The Silence” to separate and yet join these two works, and it’s not just radio silence but if you put on headphones and listen hard you can tell was recorded in the studio with the musicians just sitting there peacefully, because you can detect the slightest stirring every now and then. And so this silence is not arbitrary or by any means skippable, but actually meaningful and sort of beautiful. So what year does that track get? When was silence written? Was it composed? When was that decision made? 1973, because it couldn’t exist without the second track? Or 2006 when the CD came out? What genre is silence?

And the biggest thing of all is that nearly every complication here is caused by one particular type of music in my library: “classical music". I wouldn’t have any trouble putting an ELO album in with the tracks and listing and band name and album name and year it was released. iTunes fits this mold perfectly. But “classical” ruins it all. Is it even right to call it “classical?” That’s just a misnomer, describing the tradition this music all came from. Classical is an era, a time and place in music that had a beginning and an ending. But I don’t also have “romantic” music, or “20th century” music.

Besides, what do Terry Riley and Johann Sebastian Bach have in common anyway? What do In C and The Well-Tempered Klavier share at all that we have a word to connect them? Is there really a string all the way from one to the other? Or, more importantly, is there NOT a string from Bach to, say, Paul McCartney, or Miles Davis, or Jeff Buckley, or Dave Grohl?

Is there ANY justification at all for not only continuing to call everything from Monteverdi to Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Chopin to Stravinsky to Holst to Messiaen to Crumb to Glass all classical, but even continuing to think they are even remotely of the same genre or style? What do they share at all except some pretend lineage that is nothing but a stamp of elitism?

So what about “Art” music? Are Simon and Garfunkel not art? Were the Pet Shop Boys not art? Is Billie Eilish not art? Seen by many—even previously myself—as a kind of solution word to this problem, all it does is seem to make things worse. Because sure, maybe at some points in history there was a pretty big divide between the literal sacred music of the churches, and the lowly vernacular songs of the troubadours. But that is no longer the case. The music industry is one of the largest industries there is, and “classical” even in its too-broad form is only a small fraction of what it handles. When you sit down and think about it, what is the difference between someone sitting in their room playing music on the piano and calling it classical or something else? If I sat down and recorded a solo piano album, would it fall under a different label than if Einaudi did it, or Springsteen (wouldn’t that be something?) Is it about what the notes actually sound like, or is it something else? Something about the person?

I think I’m just about done with this invisible divide, and I’m certainly done with the headaches that come from trying to allow my iTunes to perpetuate it. The only thing I can think of that’s truly different about the music from Bach to Adès, the only thing that whole strand of centuries of tradition has in common throughout, is that it’s all music written by someone for other people to play. Sure I know that in many circumstances, the composer would perform their own works, but where else do you find dozens if not hundreds of recordings of different groups playing the same work with the intent to make it as true and identical as possible to the others. Classical music is music for others to play under very clear expectations of what to do and achieve. What other kind of music encourages you to purchase the sheet music and perform it as true as possible to the directions? Would it not be the absolute strangest thing ever if Olivia Rodrigo released sheet music for good 4 u that came as close as possible to recreating her own recording, and shared the sheet music online and tried to encourage people to perform it at concerts the way more typical “composers” do? What does it mean that we acknowledge how weird that is?

If you’ve read this long. I have terrible news: I don’t have anything close to an answer for any of this. Or even a stab-in-the-dark guess. Music, the way we listen, the way we share, the way we interact, and label and divide and compare—all of it is about the weirdest and messiest catastrophe I can imagine. And for people like me, who spend perhaps as much time organizing their musical library as there is time worth of music in it (and get some borderline sick sense of pleasure from doing so) there’s a lot of heartache and struggle involved, most of which that has nothing at all to do with the software itself and everything to do with how this stuff is filed away in my own mind and—probably—the minds of most of us, anyhow.

I don’t have some clever one-liner to wrap this up. Something to put all of these anxieties at ease and feel that this issue is put to rest. The only thing I have is a very strong confidence that, as long as people continue asking these kind of stupid questions at all, everything will be okay. But that if we stop, there could be some ugly consequences.