A musician looks over a score in the Liverpool Philarmonic Hall. Photograph: Don McPhee
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once praised music for its ability to transport the listener to another world. It's a point many others have echoed, but few have actually tried to achieve. But now the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra have decided that, if they are to have a real-life future, then another world is where they are going to have to perform: a concert has been arranged to take place in a specially-designed concert hall in the world of Second Life, the internet-based virtual reality world where users can live the lives and buy the houses denied them in the first life.
Many will groan at the news, citing the increasing desperation of the classical music industry's attempts to reach out to a new audience. But the idea, while certainly original in spirit, only departs from established practice - by which orchestras and musicians can sell broadcast rights for live transmission - in two respects. For the experience of the concert will be no less "real" than other "live" broadcast music events - and, of course, the largest part of our contemporary musical experience is of pre-recorded music, something which, in terms of the performance, is much more "virtual" than the one Second Lifers will undergo.
First of all, there will be no coughing. The audience will be "together" in the concert hall, and able to interact, but those who wish to cough between, and even during, movements will be free to do so because their esophageal excesses will remain for their ears only, as will the ringing of their mobile phones and the unwrapping of sweets. Even if they decide to take advantage of the online lavatories provided so thoughtfully for visitors to the 3D replica of Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall, fellow concert-goers will remain undisturbed.
The other way in which it will be different is that the event is much more likely to succeed in getting classical music (including two world premieres) to a new audience who are open to the experience. For while in the real world our range of activities is tightly policed by all sorts of beliefs about the kind of person we are, how our actions appear to others and whether our friends will laugh at us, the world of Second Life - like much internet life - is considerably less repressed. Oddly, then, given the pretences on which Second Life existence depends, the virtual concert is likely to be a wonderfully unpretentious occasion.
