Music, as any anthropologist worth his or her salt will tell you, is one of the fundamental activities of mankind. Wherever we've put our messy footprints, from the grottiest of caves to the trendiest of clubs, there has been singing, dancing and rhythmic rattling of sabres.
Except, it seems, on the World Wide Web. The Web is, for the most part, a remarkably silent place - unless the gentle sound of a computer contentedly munching megabytes of information is music to your particular ears. For the most part, this silence is a blessing in disguise; just about the last thing our overheated, overcrowded world needs is another layer of white noise. But what about the pages relating to classical music and musicians - surely they must pour forth a stream of sounds to soothe the savage breast of your average music-loving surfer?
In fact, surfing the Web is a quasi-musical activity in itself; all that shifting from one site to another by means of links in cyberspace is rather like a complex series of key changes, with the home page acting as a sort of tonic chord to anchor you to "reality". A good place to begin a musical journey on the World Wide Web, then, is at home - literally - with the Browse Ireland pages at http://www.browseireland.com.
This is where the majority of Irish classical musicians hangs out and there are a healthy number of sites under the "Arts: Classical Music" heading, though their content and quality vary wildly.
First up are the Aertel classical music listings, which are immaculately updated but woefully basic - no flourishes here, musical or otherwise. You'll be told, for example, that Hanno Strydom and Kris Bezuidenhout are to perform at the John Field Room tonight, but given no clue as to what they might be doing; they could be philosophers, magicians or a flute and piano duo.
Switching to the next site on the list is no help, for it's in Italian. "Alphorn Duo", it declares; "Le suggestioni del corno delle Alpi dal duo pi∙ famoso in Italia". To be fair, there is an English version to be had by clicking on the little Union Jack in the corner, and the three 20-second musical segments on offer (you can choose between "Alp", "Horn", and "Duo") are pleasantly robust, but what it all has to do with Irish classical music and musicians remains a somewhat delightful mystery.
Considerably more tangible are the enterprising Crescendo Quartet, who describe themselves as "Dublin's hottest classical string quartet" and who will play at your wedding or at a dinner-party for IR£160 an hour. The Crescendo site offers automatic background music which plays gently as you fiddle about in the various sub-headings and which is terrific until you realise that (help! where's the "mute" button?) it's actually a creepy-crawly electronic version of the dreaded Pachelbel Canon. The Canon is unctuous enough at the best of times - but honestly, this version would be OTT in a funeral parlour. Of the Crescendo Quartet at work, there is, alas, no sample available.
And so it goes; as you trawl across the links you'll find that most of the big "names" in Irish classical music, from Barry Douglas and James Galway to the National Symphony Orchestra, are to be found on the Web offering generous amounts of biographical, programme and recording details and lamentably little music. On the other hand, those sites which do offer music tend to go down the funeral-parlour road with synthesised versions of, for example, the Kyrie from Schubert's Mass in G (Dublin Orchestral Players) or the String Quartet by Mendelssohn (Dublin Chamber Music Group).
An exasperated inquiry to Webopaedia (http://webopedia.internet.com) established that the synthesising culprit is MIDI (Musical Instrumental Digital Interface), a standard adopted by the electronic music industry for controlling the sounds which come out of your computer via its sound card. MIDI is a commendable invention, no doubt, and great fun to play around with, since it allows today's composers to tinker and layer and patch to their hearts' content but, if it's going to reduce Schubert and Mendelssohn to the level of an electronic musical box, it should be used with a deal of caution. Compared to this sort of thing, silence is certainly golden.
RealAudio is, Webopaedia tells me, a way of "streaming" or buffering the downloaded sound so it can play and download at the same time. So there is a way of getting high-quality sound without interminable download waits. Why don't the Irish classical sites make more use of it (see Vanbrugh site listed in the panel)?
In the wider Web world, to be sure, there is plenty of music to be had - major record labels like EMI, for example, allow music-lovers to sample the latest recordings in their various catalogues - but, on the whole, classical music Web sites are still predominantly visual in design and disappointingly po-faced in content. Even opera sites, where you might be entitled to expect a bit of Verdi-type drama, are fixated on factual detail about composers and artists. No learned essays about the meaning of it all, no personal anecdotes, no sophisticated chat and certainly no jokes; the Mozart of musical multimedia, it would appear, has yet to put in an appearance.