encore

Encore is the French word for 'again,' 'still,' or 'yet' — from Latin hanc horam (this hour, at this time), which compressed through Old French into encore, meaning 'at this moment still' or 'even now.' The word exists in French as an ordinary adverb: encore du pain means 'more bread'; vous dormez encore means 'you're still sleeping.' It is not a theatrical term in French and was never used in French theaters as a shout to recall a performer — the French used the word bis (Latin for 'twice') for that purpose. Yet British audiences in the eighteenth century, having encountered French theater and misread, or perhaps deliberately adopted, the French adverb as a theatrical interjection, began shouting encore to demand repetition of a song or a piece. The word's French origins gave it an air of Continental sophistication; its meaning of 'again' or 'still' made it semantically apt even if the adoption was historically confused.

The encore as theatrical institution codified during the eighteenth century in Britain and spread to Italy, Germany, and America through the mechanisms of touring opera companies and the international circuits of classical music performance. In opera, the encore (or bis in Italian practice) became a feature of bel canto performance that composers and singers learned to exploit and audiences came to expect. Certain arias — pieces of sufficient brevity and brilliance to be performable twice in a single evening without exhausting the audience's attention — were composed with the possibility of repetition in mind. Audiences at La Scala in Milan would demand that a celebrated tenor repeat a particularly brilliant high note or a soprano reprise a showstopping aria; the encore became not an exceptional tribute but a scheduled interruption of the performance, negotiated by custom between artist and audience.

The relationship between encore and the prepared performance is peculiarly doubled. The encore is presented as spontaneous — the audience's unplanned demand, the performer's generous response to an exceptional evening — while almost always being thoroughly prepared in advance. A touring concert artist arrives at every venue with an encore program, usually of shorter and more immediately accessible pieces than the main program, ready to perform at the conclusion. The management of the encore — how many times to leave the stage and return, when to begin the first encore piece, which pieces in which order — is choreographed as carefully as the main performance. The pretense of spontaneity is part of the ritual: both performer and audience consent to the fiction that the encore was not planned, that the performance is extending itself past its own conclusion through pure mutual desire.

The encore has migrated from the classical concert hall into popular music performance, where it has become perhaps even more institutionalized. Rock and pop concerts typically build the setlist to conclude with a lesser piece, leave the stage, return after a minute of audience applause to perform the 'unexpected' finale of the evening's biggest songs. The ritual has become so predictable that audiences know to continue applauding after the lights come up, that the encore is scheduled into the concert's running time, and that leaving after the apparent set conclusion means missing the most anticipated songs of the evening. The encore persists because both parties — performer and audience — have found it useful: it gives the audience a sense of power (we called them back), gives the performer a second ending with which to close the emotional arc, and gives everyone present the pleasure of feeling that the evening exceeded its own design.