There is a line from Hans Christian Andersen that Scott Alexander quotes in his lecture notes on building a stand-up act: “Where words fail, music speaks.” I read that line and thought it was a nice sentiment. Then I put music under one of my routines and realized it was not a sentiment. It was a technical truth about how performance works.
The routine was one I had been performing for months. It was solid. It got good reactions. It had a clear structure, a strong reveal, and a moment of genuine astonishment at the climax. By every measurable standard, it was working.
Then, on an impulse during a late-night hotel room session in Vienna, I played a song while running through the choreography. I was not trying to match the music to the routine. I was just listening to music while I practiced, the way you might put on a playlist while cooking or working out. But something happened in the overlap. The movements I had rehearsed hundreds of times began to feel different. The rhythm of the routine shifted. My pacing changed. The emotional register of what I was doing rose from competent demonstration to something I did not have a word for.
The next time I performed that routine, I used the song. The reaction was not incrementally better. It was categorically different. People did not just applaud the reveal. They sat in the music for a moment after the effect ended, held by the song, held by the mood, held in a state that my words and actions alone had never created.
That was the night I understood what music does to magic. It does not accompany the performance. It transforms it.
Why Music Changes the Category
Let me be precise about what I mean by “changing the category.” A magic effect performed in silence or over spoken patter is processed by the audience primarily as a puzzle. What just happened? How did that work? The cognitive engagement is analytical, even when the emotional response is genuine surprise or delight. The audience is watching, processing, and evaluating.
When music enters, the processing shifts. The audience is still watching, but they are also feeling. The music provides an emotional context that the mind alone cannot supply. It tells the audience how to feel about what they are seeing — not through manipulation, but through association. A sweeping orchestral swell says: this is grand, this is beautiful, this is significant. A driving rock beat says: this is exciting, this is energetic, this is fun. A simple piano melody says: this is intimate, this is personal, this is real.
The audience does not consciously analyze these signals. They simply feel them. And the feeling elevates the experience from “watching someone do something clever” to “being part of a moment.” That elevation is the difference between a trick and a showpiece.
Scott Alexander makes this point with characteristic directness in his notes. He describes routines he performed for years that received decent reactions, but when he paired them with the right music, audience members suddenly singled them out as highlights. The material did not change. The method did not change. The performer did not change. The music changed, and everything followed.
The Practical Framework for Pairing
Alexander provides a framework for matching music to effects that I have found genuinely useful, and I want to share it because it solved a problem I did not know how to approach systematically.
The first approach is the two-list method. On one side, list the songs you love — songs that move you, energize you, make you feel something specific. On the other side, list your effects. Then look for natural pairings based on emotional tone, lyrical content, or sheer feeling. Do not overthink this. Do not try to find a song whose lyrics literally describe what happens in the effect. Look for emotional resonance. The song that makes you feel the way you want the audience to feel during a particular routine is probably the right song, even if the lyrics have nothing to do with magic.
The second approach is the improvisation method. Put on music and handle your props. Do not rehearse a specific routine. Just play. Let the music dictate the pace and mood of your movements. See what emerges. This is harder than it sounds, because the temptation to fall back into rehearsed choreography is strong. But when you resist that temptation and let the music guide you, unexpected connections appear. A slow, contemplative song might reveal a meditative quality in a routine you had always performed at high energy. A fast, percussive track might inject urgency into a routine you had been treating as leisurely.
The third approach is the substitution method. Take a routine you already perform to music — or one you have been imagining with a particular song — and try it with a completely different genre. This is Alexander’s suggestion, and it has produced some of my most surprising discoveries. A routine I had mentally paired with dramatic orchestral music turned out to be far more effective with a simple acoustic guitar track. The orchestral version felt overwrought, trying too hard. The acoustic version felt honest, personal, vulnerable. Same movements, same choreography, vastly different emotional impact.
The Architecture of a Musical Piece
Performing a routine to music is not the same as performing a routine while music plays. This distinction matters enormously, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand it.
When you perform a routine while music plays, the music is background. It sets a mood, it fills silence, it adds ambiance. But the routine and the music exist independently. They happen to occupy the same time and space, but they are not connected. The audience processes them separately: there is the thing the performer is doing, and there is the song playing.
When you perform a routine to music, the two are integrated. The movements align with the musical phrasing. The climactic moments in the routine coincide with climactic moments in the song. The pacing of your actions follows the rhythm of the music. The audience processes them as a single experience: the music and the magic are telling the same story.
This integration requires choreography. And choreography requires knowing your song intimately.
I listen to the song I am going to use in a routine dozens of times before I begin mapping the routine onto it. I learn its structure: where the verses are, where the chorus hits, where the bridge changes the energy, where the final crescendo builds. I identify the key moments — the beat that punches, the silence that breathes, the lyrical phrase that carries emotional weight. These key moments become anchor points around which I choreograph the routine.
The reveal does not happen at a random point in the song. It happens on the beat drop. Or in the silence before the final chorus. Or on the last note. The production of an object does not happen during a forgettable verse. It happens on the triumphant return of the main theme. The quiet setup does not happen during the chorus. It happens during the bridge, when the energy is pulled back and the audience is waiting for the song to return to full power.
This level of integration turns the routine into something that feels inevitable. The audience cannot imagine the effect without the music or the music without the effect. They are one thing. And that unity is what makes a showpiece.
Musical Pieces as Pacing Tools
Alexander makes a structural argument for including musical pieces in your show that goes beyond the aesthetic benefits. In a forty-five-minute talking act, he argues, the audience needs breaks from processing words. Two or three silent routines to music, sprinkled through the program, give both the audience and the performer a welcome change of pace.
This is a variety argument, and it connects to his broader principle that a great show has layers, peaks and valleys, shifts in mood and register. A show that is all talking is monotonous, no matter how good the talker. A show that is all music is alienating, because the audience never gets to know you. The mix is what creates the texture.
I have integrated this principle into my own show structure, and the effect on pacing has been significant. My show typically runs around thirty minutes for corporate events. Within that thirty minutes, I aim for two musical segments: one in the first third and one near the end. The first musical segment serves as a palette cleanser after the opening and personality establishment. The second serves as the build to the emotional close — the warm, personal moment that Alexander describes in the vaudeville tradition of ending with something charming and sincere.
Between those musical segments, the show is spoken. I talk, I joke, I interact with volunteers, I build the narrative thread of the show through language and personality. The audience gets to know me. And then the music arrives, and the register shifts, and suddenly they are seeing a different dimension of the performance. The contrast is the key. Without the spoken sections, the musical sections would not feel special. Without the musical sections, the spoken sections would not get the breathing room they need.
The Emotional Shortcut
Here is something I want to acknowledge because it is both the power and the risk of using music in performance: music is an emotional shortcut.
A well-chosen song can make a mediocre routine feel profound. It can create emotional depth that the routine itself does not earn through its own structure or choreography. The audience responds to the music’s emotional content and attributes that emotion to the magical experience, even when the magic itself is not particularly strong.
This is the risk. If you use music to compensate for weak material, you are building on a false foundation. The audience will feel something during the performance, but the feeling will not survive the walk to the parking lot. They will remember the song, not the effect. They will have had a musical experience with some visual accompaniment, not a magical experience enhanced by music.
The honest use of music is additive, not compensatory. You start with a routine that is strong on its own — clear structure, clean execution, genuine astonishment at the climax — and then you add music to elevate it further. The music enhances what is already there. It does not create what is missing.
I learned this through direct experience. I had a routine that was not working, and I thought adding music would fix it. It did not. The music made the mood better, but the structural problems in the routine were still visible. The setup was too long. The climax was unclear. The audience was confused about what they were supposed to feel, and the music just added another layer of confusion: should I feel what the music is telling me to feel, or should I feel what the magic is telling me to feel?
I stripped the music, fixed the routine, and only then reintroduced the music. The difference was stark. The strong routine with music was a showpiece. The weak routine with music was a mess with a nice soundtrack.
Cross-Genre Freedom
One of Harlan’s pieces of advice about music selection is to cross genres freely. Whatever fits the mood of the piece is fair game, regardless of whether it matches your personal taste or the expected genre for your audience.
I have taken this advice to heart, and it has led to some unexpected choices. A routine I perform at Austrian corporate events uses a piece of music that would be completely out of place in the formal, buttoned-up context if you described it in words. But in performance, it works. The audience does not care about genre classification. They care about how the music makes them feel in that specific moment, watching that specific performance.
Harlan also introduces the concept of the stinger: a quick music clip that sets the tone for what is about to happen. Not a full song, just a few seconds of audio that creates context. A dramatic chord. A familiar riff. A recognizable melody that primes the audience for a specific emotional register. Stingers are underused by performers at my level, and they represent a significant opportunity for production value that costs almost nothing to implement.
Pre-show music, which Harlan discusses as a mood-setting tool, has also become part of my standard practice. The music playing as the audience takes their seats is not random. It is curated to establish the emotional territory of the show before a single word is spoken. An audience that has been listening to warm, sophisticated jazz for ten minutes before the show begins is in a fundamentally different state than an audience that has been sitting in silence or listening to generic background music.
The Universal Language
There is a reason Andersen called music a universal language, and it connects to one of the specific challenges of performing in Austria.
My audiences are frequently international. Corporate events in Vienna, Salzburg, and Graz often include attendees from across Europe, sometimes globally. The spoken portions of my show are in English or German, depending on the audience. But music transcends that language barrier entirely. A musical segment communicates the same emotional content to the German speaker, the French speaker, the Japanese speaker, and the Brazilian speaker in the same room.
This is not metaphorical. I have watched a musical segment land identically across a linguistically diverse audience. The setup and spoken patter that preceded it required translation or at least basic comprehension. The music required nothing. It was received directly, emotionally, without the intermediary of language processing. And the magical effect, performed in sync with the music, was received the same way.
If you perform for diverse audiences, musical segments are not just variety tools. They are accessibility tools. They are moments in your show where every single person in the room, regardless of language, culture, or background, is having the same experience. In a world where connection across differences is increasingly valued, that is worth more than most performers realize.
The Song Is Part of the Effect
I want to end with a principle that has become foundational to how I think about music in my show. The song is not background. The song is not accompaniment. The song is part of the effect.
When I choose a song for a routine, I am choosing an emotional partner for the experience I am creating. The song will carry part of the emotional weight. The song will provide part of the structure. The song will create part of the memory that the audience takes home. If the song is wrong — too generic, too familiar in a distracting way, too emotionally mismatched — it actively works against the effect, no matter how good the magic is.
The right song does not just add to the experience. It multiplies it. It takes good magic and makes it unforgettable.
Finding that right song is work. It requires experimentation, honesty about what is working and what is not, and the willingness to abandon a song you love because it does not serve the routine. The process is creative, iterative, and sometimes frustrating.
But when you find it — when the song and the routine click into alignment and the music tells the audience exactly what to feel at exactly the moment the magic happens — you will know. Because the audience will tell you. Not with words. With silence. With stillness. With the held breath that says: I am not just watching this. I am in it.
That is what the right song does. It puts the audience inside the experience instead of in front of it. And inside is where magic lives.