Music is my other life.
Before magic, before the hotel rooms and the card practice and the late-night video tutorials, there was music. It was the thing I did when the consulting work was done, the thing that kept me sane through years of airport lounges and client dinners and strategy documents that blurred together. Music was the passion I could not bring on the road — which is, if you have been following this blog, part of why I picked up a deck of cards in the first place.
But music never left me. It could not travel with me in the form of instruments and practice rooms, but it traveled with me in the form of understanding. Years of listening, analyzing, feeling how great music moves through time — that understanding was always there, waiting for me to apply it somewhere new.
I did not apply it to magic deliberately. It happened gradually, over months of performing, until one night in Innsbruck I was reviewing a recording of my show and I suddenly heard it. Not the music playing in the background at the venue. My show. I heard the rhythm of it, the dynamics of it, the way the energy rose and fell across thirty minutes. And I realized that my show was not a symphony. It was a flat line with spikes. There was no crescendo. There was no dynamic range. There was no compositional logic at all.
That realization — that a show has musical properties whether you design them or not, and that mine were terrible — changed everything about how I structure a performance.
What a Crescendo Actually Is
Most people think a crescendo is just getting louder. It is not. That is a common misunderstanding, and it leads to a common mistake in performance: the assumption that building to a climax means making each piece bigger, louder, and more spectacular than the last until the closer is the biggest, loudest, most spectacular thing of all.
In music, a crescendo is an increase in intensity — and intensity is not the same as volume. A crescendo can be achieved by adding instruments, yes, making the sound literally louder. But it can also be achieved by increasing harmonic complexity, by accelerating the tempo, by narrowing the rhythmic patterns, by raising the melodic line, by increasing the density of musical information. A string quartet playing pianissimo can crescendo to a devastating climax without ever getting loud. The intensity increases, but the volume remains the same. The power is in the accumulation of complexity, not decibels.
This distinction transformed my thinking about show structure. I had been trying to get louder — each effect more visually spectacular than the last, each reaction bigger, each moment more explosive. But that is not a crescendo. That is an arms race. And like any arms race, it is unsustainable. By the fourth piece you are out of ammunition, and the closer has nowhere left to go.
The real crescendo — the one that works in music and in magic — is about increasing emotional complexity. Not just bigger effects, but deeper effects. Not just more impressive, but more resonant. Not just spectacular, but meaningful. The show starts with something that engages the mind, and it builds toward something that engages the heart. The crescendo is not a line going up. It is a spiral going deeper.
Tempo Changes
One of the first musical concepts I applied to my show was tempo.
In music, tempo is the speed at which the piece moves. Fast tempos create excitement, energy, urgency. Slow tempos create contemplation, weight, emotional depth. Great composers shift tempo deliberately across a piece, using the changes themselves as expressive tools. A sudden slowing after a fast passage creates a sense of arrival. A sudden acceleration after a slow passage creates a surge of energy.
My early shows had one tempo: fast. Everything moved at the same brisk pace. Transitions were quick. Effects were efficient. The whole show had the energy of someone who was worried the audience might get bored if he took a breath.
When I started thinking about tempo as a variable I could control, I began experimenting with deliberate changes. I slowed the third piece down — way down. Where the first two pieces were fast and visual, the third became slow and conversational. I took my time with the setup. I let the audience sit with the premise. I made the build gradual and the reveal delayed.
The effect on the audience was remarkable. The tempo change functioned exactly like it does in music — it signaled a shift in mode. The audience’s posture changed. Their breathing slowed. Their attention deepened. The fast pieces had engaged their excitement. The slow piece engaged their concentration. Different tempos, different modes of attention. Both valid. Both necessary.
And when the fourth piece picked the tempo back up — when the energy returned after the slow passage — the acceleration felt exhilarating. Not because the fourth piece was faster than the first two (it was about the same tempo), but because the slow piece had reset the audience’s baseline. The contrast made the return to speed feel like emergence, like breaking through the surface of water after a deep dive.
Dynamic Range
Dynamic range in music is the difference between the quietest and loudest passages. A piece with wide dynamic range moves from whisper to thunder. A piece with narrow dynamic range stays in the same volume zone throughout. Wide dynamic range is more emotionally engaging, because it gives the audience a fuller spectrum of experience.
My early shows had almost no dynamic range. Everything was at about the same energy level — call it a six or seven out of ten. The comedy was funny but not hilarious. The drama was interesting but not gripping. The reveals were impressive but not devastating. The whole show existed in a comfortable middle zone.
When I started designing for dynamic range, I made two changes. First, I made the quiet moments quieter. Instead of maintaining a baseline of pleasant engagement, I allowed some moments to be genuinely still, genuinely intimate, genuinely soft. The stories between effects became more personal, more vulnerable. I dropped my voice. I moved closer to the audience. I created moments that were not trying to be impressive at all — moments that were just human.
Second, I made the loud moments louder. Not literally louder (although sometimes that too), but more intense, more energetically committed, more fully expressed. When a piece was meant to be explosive, I let it explode. No holding back. No hedge. Full commitment to the energy of the moment.
The result was a show that breathed. It had valleys and peaks that actually deserved the names. The valleys were genuine valleys — quiet, intimate, personal. The peaks were genuine peaks — explosive, astonishing, overwhelming. And the distance between them — the dynamic range — gave the audience a journey through a complete spectrum of emotional experience.
Weber talks about this in terms of contrast — the idea that the peak only feels like a peak if there is a valley next to it. But the musical framing goes further. In music, dynamic range is not just about contrast between adjacent moments. It is about the overall shape of the piece. A symphony typically begins at moderate dynamics, explores both extremes during the development, and arrives at the climax with full dynamic force. The crescendo to the final climax is not just louder than the passage before it. It is the loudest moment in the entire piece. The dynamic range has been widening throughout, and the climax sits at the absolute top of the range.
This is the architecture I now aim for. The opening of my show establishes a moderate dynamic level. The early pieces explore the lower end of the range — quieter, more intimate, more conversational. The middle pieces begin to push the upper end — more energy, more intensity, more audience involvement. And the closer occupies the absolute peak of the dynamic range — the most intense, most emotionally complex, most fully expressed moment in the entire show.
The audience feels this as a crescendo even if they cannot name the mechanism. They feel the show expanding, opening up, getting larger and deeper and more powerful. And when the closer arrives, it does not just feel like the biggest moment. It feels like the inevitable destination that the entire show has been traveling toward.
The Final Swell
In orchestral music, the final swell is the moment before the last chord where every instrument is playing, every section is at full voice, and the entire harmonic structure converges on the resolution. It is the sonic equivalent of every river reaching the sea at the same instant. It is overwhelming not because it is loud (though it is) but because it is complete. Everything that has been introduced throughout the piece — every theme, every motif, every harmonic thread — is present in this moment, resolved and unified.
I think about the final swell when I design my closer. Not just as the strongest effect, but as the moment where everything in the show converges. The theme that was introduced in the opener reaches its conclusion. The callbacks from earlier pieces pay off. The emotional arc that began with curiosity and moved through surprise, laughter, intimacy, and wonder arrives at its destination. The closer is not just a strong effect performed at the end. It is the resolution of the entire experience.
This is what separates a show with a strong closer from a show with a great closer. A strong closer is a powerful effect in the final position. A great closer is the inevitable conclusion of everything that preceded it. The audience does not just react to the effect. They react to the completion. The feeling of “oh, so THAT is what this was all building to.” The satisfaction of an experience that makes retrospective sense, where every moment that came before was preparation for this one.
Music taught me this. A great symphony does not end with a loud chord. It ends with a necessary chord — the chord that resolves every tension the music has created, the chord that the entire piece has been building toward, the chord that could not be any other chord. The finale is not arbitrary. It is inevitable.
The Rehearsal Translation
How do you actually apply musical thinking to magic rehearsal? Here is what I do.
First, I map the emotional contour of my show. I draw a simple graph: time on the x-axis, emotional intensity on the y-axis. I plot each piece and each transition. What I am looking for is the shape. Is it flat? Is it a series of identical spikes? Is it ascending? Is it a crescendo?
If the shape is flat or spiky, I start adjusting. I move pieces around. I add rest periods. I change the emotional register of transitions. I increase the dynamic range between valleys and peaks. I keep adjusting until the graph shows the shape I want: a long, gradual, accelerating ascent to a single climactic peak.
Second, I rehearse the transitions as carefully as I rehearse the effects. In music, the transitions between movements are compositional decisions. They determine the pace of the piece, the relationship between sections, the listener’s experience of moving through time. In my show, the transitions are where the tempo changes happen, where the dynamic shifts occur, where the crescendo is either maintained or broken. A clumsy transition between two brilliant effects is like a splice in a recording — it breaks the illusion of continuity and reminds the audience that they are watching a series of separate things.
Third, I listen to music while reviewing my show recordings. This sounds strange, but it works. I play recordings of pieces with the crescendo structures I admire — Beethoven, Ravel, even film scores — and then I watch my show recording with the sound off, comparing the emotional shape of the music to the emotional shape of the performance. Where the music builds, does my show build? Where the music rests, does my show rest? Where the music explodes, does my show deliver?
This cross-referencing has given me a sensitivity to pacing and dynamics that I could not have developed by watching magic alone. Music is the master teacher of emotional architecture. It has been refining these principles for centuries. Magic has been performing them intuitively, often well, often brilliantly, but rarely with the systematic understanding that music brings to the craft.
The Bridge
This is the final post in the “Build to a Climax” section of this blog. Over the past fifteen posts, I have explored what it means to construct a show that ascends — from the roller coaster metaphor to the mountaintop principle, from emotional undulation to the pre-climax pause, from sequencing and rest periods to the musical logic of the crescendo.
If I had to distill everything into a single image, it would be this: a show is a piece of music. It has tempo, dynamics, texture, and structure. It moves through time, and the way it moves through time determines whether the audience arrives at the finale feeling like they have been on a journey or like they have been standing in one place watching things happen.
The crescendo is not a technique. It is a philosophy. It says: every moment serves the next moment. Every piece prepares the audience for the piece that follows. Every breath, every pause, every shift in energy is a compositional choice. And the final moment — the closer, the climax, the resolution — is not just the end of the show. It is the culmination of everything the show has been.
What comes next is the blueprint. We have explored the principles of building to a climax — the how of emotional architecture. The next section moves to the what. What are the actual structural components of a complete act? How do you design an opener that establishes trust, a middle that develops the audience relationship, and a closer that delivers the emotional payoff? What is the skeleton that holds the muscle and skin of performance in place?
In other words: now that we understand how a crescendo works, it is time to build the instrument that plays it. The next posts will explore the act structure — the blueprint for a complete performance from the first moment on stage to the last.
I am looking forward to it. Because structure without soul is hollow, but soul without structure is chaos. And what I have been searching for, since that first nervous set two years ago, is the place where structure and soul meet.
Music showed me where that place is. Magic gives me the reason to go there.