Raising the musical question.

(I was going to title this post, "Begging the musical question," but Grammar Girl set me straight on what begging the question actually means. You're welcome.)

Over the past couple of weekends, I've been spending some quality time importing most of my CDs into iTunes. Yes, I know, digital music has been around for several years now. But old habits die hard. It still seemed easier to me to plunk a CD into the Bose player than to pull all of the discs out of the drawer and load them, one by one, into the computer.

Also, the last time I tried importing CDs into iTunes, several years ago, the process seemed unintuitive and time-consuming. But maybe that was because iTunes defaulted to playing each CD as I uploaded it. Or maybe Apple has improved the program.

Whatever the reason, I had never done it. But I've been thinking about it for the past couple of months, ever since a friend remarked to me, "You don't really listen to music, do you?" Um, well, no. Part of it is that I have really weird musical taste, which I've written about here before. Also, it's been difficult for the past couple of years because one or another of the kids has been bunking in my living room pretty consistently, and not only is the living room where the CD player is, but of course they'd rather listen to their own music than Mom's. Especially when Mom insists on singing along.

And too, there's the problem of certain songs or albums being tied in my memory to people or events I'd rather not think about.

But this is certainly a sorry pass for someone who used to know how to play four instruments and who went off to college with the intention of majoring in music. So I decided it was time to bite the bullet and just load the CDs into the computer already.

The project went faster than I thought it would. And you know what? I've got a lot of really good music. The late 1960s and early '70s (well, except for disco...) produced great pop albums like Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, Gerry Rafferty's City to City, and Billy Joel's The Stranger -- albums that don't contain a single song I would skip. And I have a fair selection of classical music: J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Haydn's Symphony No. 94, Smetana's Ma Vlast, and several classical guitar CDs -- including the one I'm listening to as I write this post. It's called Rameau, Scarlatti, Couperin, Bach, and the guitarists are Sergio and Odair Assad. It's somewhat unusual, as classical guitar albums go, because it includes only one Bach transcription ("The Well-Tempered Clavier") and nothing by a Spanish composer at all.

I'm looking forward to spending some quality hours reacquainting myself with my own music collection. Please forgive me if I start to sing along.

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These moments of musical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.