In his keynote speech at the Zapproved Preservation Excellence Conference in Portland, Dr. Tony Salvador of Intel compared the “encores” of performers today to those of performers a century ago. “Encore,” Salvador noted, is French for “again;” yet, we use it to mean “more.”  Today, performers brought back by applause don’t repeat their performance; they play a different song.

But for hundreds of years, the encore was an unpredictable, spontaneous eruption.  Stirred by a brilliant aria in the midst of the show, members of the audience would leap to their feet in applause, shouting, “ENCORE! ENCORE!” The singer and musicians were compelled to stop and perform exactly the same song AGAIN.  This might happen over and over, until the rapture was so fixed in the listeners’ minds they’d let the show go on.

The audiences of the 18^th and 19^th centuries demanded repetition of what they heard because…