Four stars or five?

This morning as I sat lazily checking e-mail and such, I decided to put my 22 GB's of music on shuffle, just to see what would happen. So I'm bouncing along to Chopin and then Sufjan and Marvin Gaye and Imogen Heap and some 50's group I didn't bother to check the name of, when the shuffle landed on Tchaikovsky -- a piece I hadn't heard in a long time, one I couldn't even identify at once. I checked, and it was Nocturne (Op. 19 No. 4).

I stopped everything else I was doing to listen to it play. It's a languorous adagio, full of fluid, yearning strings, with delicate horns and an airy, twittering flute toward the end. I wanted to remember it and be sure to play it again later, so I decided to give it a rating. And that's when I felt it: the hesitation. Was it guilt? Certainly a feeling of unworthiness. It struck me as utterly ridiculous that here I was, eating oatmeal, in my PJ's, no less, having the nerve to bestow a rating on Tchaikovsky.

TCHAIKOVSKY, people!

Who am I to judge one of the great masters of classical music? It suddenly seemed very, very wrong that iTunes had given me this power, that with the click of a mouse, I could decide whether Nocturne (Op. 19 No. 4) was worthy of the ultimate, the five-star rating, or whether it merited only a four.

And yet, one must soldier on. So my thinking went like this: It was no Serenade for Strings in C Major (Op. 48), which calls to mind Balanchine and immediately makes me want to extend my one arm into the air and then flick my hand into a slow, arcing port de bras -- an instant five stars.

On a first listen, no, this Nocturne certainly wasn't that. But after listening a second time, closing my eyes and letting the music soak into my limbs, I did find myself swirling into an improvisation of sorts, stepping onto one foot and, holding onto the pole in my apartment for balance, indulging in a deep fondue (that's the bending of the leg, not the gooey cheese pot). All right then. So it did make me yearn to have a partner, not a pole -- and to have my old body back. Perhaps better than four stars, then. Yeah. Five it is.