I didn't want anything to jump into the foreground, so I set up a new dock (called 'hotkey scripts') and set it to 'allow AppleScripts to run in background' in the Miscellaneous preferences tab. I then added my scripts to the new dock, and used the 'item options' from the contexual menu to set a hotkey for each. I set it so that Apple+left and right arrows are previous and next track, but any key combo would do it, presumably as long as it's not used elsewhere. The Applescripts, for anyone interested, are simple:
tell application "iTunes"Replace next with previous for the other script, obviously.
next track
end tell
Now I can control iTunes from anywhere :-)

