Encore Magic

Encores are hated as much as they are loved, loved as much as they are hated. While a great many concertgoers see these little bonbons as the locus of the performance’s real magic, many others see them as impediments to art. This article seeks to make manifest the social mediation of this antinomy, to explain it as a moment of capitalist society. It does so by moving from the surface of the encore’s commodity character to the fundamental social premise of its celebration and denial. My study begins by elucidating the form of the encore as delimited within a quasi-autonomous appendix to the official proceedings of the concert, before moving on to the market demands that shaped the solo recital in the early twentieth century. I then interpret the encore’s formal attributes in light of contemporaneous disenchantment narratives and Moishe Postone’s interpretation of commodity fetishism. Finally, in response to the inadequacy of Postone’s theory with respect to class domination and freedom, I analyze the encore via Adorno’s exchange principle, revealing in encore-loving and -hating the truth of capitalism’s unrealizable promise of justice. Inspired by Adorno’s critical theory of society, where only “consummate negativity” outlines its mirror opposite, my article endeavors to read the magical encore from the point of view of its redemption, from the point of view of the social transformations that would do justice to the promises that neither affirmation nor rejection of the encore can realize.