There is a moment I remember with a clarity that borders on embarrassment. It was my second or third proper stage show, at a corporate event in Vienna. I had prepared my effects meticulously. I had scripted every word. I had rehearsed the choreography until my hands moved on autopilot. And for the music, I had done the equivalent of typing “magic show music” into a search engine and picking the first thing that sounded vaguely appropriate.
The music was fine. Generic, inoffensive, background-appropriate. It filled the silence when I was not talking. It provided a vague sense of occasion when I walked on stage. It played underneath my silent routine at a volume that was neither too loud nor too soft. It did nothing wrong.
It also did nothing at all.
The audience clapped when they were supposed to. They reacted to the effects. They had an acceptable evening. But when I watched the footage later, I noticed something that I had not felt in the moment: the energy was flat. The room had a baseline level of engagement that never meaningfully rose or fell. There were peaks during the reveals and valleys during the setup, but the overall texture was monotone. Something was missing, and it took me months to understand that the something was the music.
Not just better music. A completely different relationship with music.
Stage One: Something Playing
John Graham and Scott Alexander both address the evolution of a performer’s relationship with music in their respective works. Graham outlines a progression that I now recognize I went through, stage by stage, over several years. Alexander captures the philosophy behind it with a quote from Hans Christian Andersen: “Where words fail, music speaks.”
The first stage is what I call “something playing.” This is where most new performers begin. You know you need music in your show because other performers have music in their shows. So you find some tracks, load them onto your device, and press play at the appropriate moments. The music is chosen primarily for function: it covers dead time, it fills silence, it provides a sonic backdrop that signals “this is a show.”
At this stage, the music selection is largely random. You might use a track because you heard it on a video tutorial. You might use it because a friend recommended it. You might use it because it was free. The criteria are practical — is it the right length? Is the energy level roughly appropriate? Will it offend anyone? — and the music exists in the show as furniture. It is there because a room without furniture feels empty, but nobody is choosing the furniture to make an artistic statement.
I lived in this stage for longer than I would like to admit. My music library for performances was a collection of generic instrumental tracks that I had downloaded in a batch during one late-night session in a hotel room in Graz. I sorted them into rough categories — “upbeat,” “dramatic,” “mellow” — and shuffled them in and out of shows without much thought. If I needed walk-on music, I grabbed something from the upbeat folder. If I needed underscore for a silent routine, I pulled from the dramatic folder. The music was interchangeable, and the shows reflected that interchangeability.
Stage Two: Intentional Selection
The second stage begins when you start choosing music for emotional reasons rather than functional ones. You are no longer asking, “What music will fill this gap?” You are asking, “What do I want the audience to feel at this moment, and what music will create that feeling?”
This shift happened for me gradually, then all at once. The gradual part was a growing awareness that certain tracks in my collection worked noticeably better than others. One walk-on song consistently produced a more energetic audience response than the alternatives. One underscore track seemed to make my silent routine feel more important, more weighty. I started paying attention to why.
The all-at-once part was a hotel room session in Innsbruck where I was running through a routine while listening to music that had nothing to do with magic. I had a streaming playlist on, something I listened to for relaxation, and a song came on that happened to align with the emotional arc of the routine I was practicing. The movements I had rehearsed hundreds of times began to feel different. The rhythm changed. The pacing shifted. By the time the song ended, I had experienced my own routine in a way that felt entirely new.
This is the moment when music stops being furniture and becomes architecture. You are no longer filling space. You are shaping the emotional experience of the audience through deliberate sonic choices. The walk-on music is not just upbeat — it is a specific song that establishes a specific tone that previews a specific kind of show. The underscore is not just dramatic — it is a specific piece whose emotional contour matches the emotional contour of the routine it accompanies.
At this stage, you start the two-list process that both Graham and Alexander recommend. On one side of a page, you list songs that move you — songs that make you feel something specific and strong. On the other side, you list your effects. Then you look for pairings based on emotional resonance, not literal connection. You are not looking for a song about cards to accompany a card routine. You are looking for a song whose emotional quality matches the emotional quality you want the audience to experience during that routine.
I spent several weeks on this exercise, and it produced some of the most important improvements in my show. A mentalism piece that had been accompanied by generic mystery-sounding music became something entirely different when I paired it with a spare, haunting piano track that I had been listening to for years without ever connecting it to performance. The effect was the same. The method was the same. The words were the same. But the audience’s experience was transformed, because the music was telling them how to feel, and what it was telling them was more specific and more true than what the generic track had been communicating.
Stage Three: Concert Quality
The third stage is what Graham calls “concert quality,” and it represents a fundamental shift in how you think about the relationship between music and performance. At this stage, every musical choice in your show — from the pre-show music that plays as the audience takes their seats to the final note that follows your bow — is deliberate, considered, and connected to the overall emotional architecture of the evening.
Concert quality means that the music is not just matched to individual effects. It is matched to the show as a whole. The pre-show music establishes the world the audience is entering. The walk-on song sets expectations for the performer they are about to meet. The music during transitions maintains emotional continuity between routines. The underscore during effects shapes the audience’s emotional processing of the impossible things they are witnessing. And the post-show music provides a gentle re-entry into the ordinary world.
At this level, you are thinking about music the way a film director thinks about a soundtrack. Every choice matters. The transition between songs matters. The volume curve matters. The moments where there is no music — the strategic silences — matter as much as the music itself. You are not just selecting songs. You are composing an emotional journey through sound.
Graham makes a practical point about concert quality that I found invaluable. You should consider using both the instrumental version and the regular version of the same song within a single routine. Play the instrumental during the procedure phase, when the audience is watching the buildup. Then, at the climax, switch to the regular version with vocals. The sudden appearance of the singing voice at the moment of the effect creates an emotional escalation that is almost impossible to achieve with words alone. The audience has been hearing the melody build, and when the vocals arrive alongside the magical moment, the two intensify each other.
I tried this with a routine in my show and the result was immediate. The instrumental version during the setup created a sense of process and anticipation. The audience could feel that something was building. And when the reveal happened, the chorus of the vocal version kicked in, and the audience’s emotional response amplified in a way that felt involuntary. They were not choosing to be moved. The music moved them.
The Practical Method
Alexander recommends a method for discovering music-effect pairings that I have found genuinely productive: 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.
I do this regularly now, usually in hotel rooms during travel. I will put on a streaming station built around a genre or artist I enjoy, pick up some props, and just move with the music. No script. No choreography. No agenda. Just exploration. Most of what happens during these sessions is unremarkable. But occasionally, something clicks. A song and a movement align in a way that produces an emotional response that I can feel in my own body. When that happens, I stop and make a note.
These notes have become the raw material for some of my best performance moments. The pairings I discover through unstructured play are often more surprising and more effective than the ones I find through deliberate analysis. When I sit down with two lists and try to match songs to effects intellectually, I tend toward obvious choices. When I let the pairing emerge from physical exploration, the choices are often counterintuitive — a slow song for a fast routine, a playful track for a serious effect — and the counterintuitive choices frequently produce the most interesting results.
Alexander also suggests trying routines you already perform with completely different genres of music. This is a surprisingly powerful exercise. I had a routine that I had always imagined as a big, dramatic moment, accompanied by sweeping orchestral music. On a whim, during one of these exploration sessions, I tried it with a simple acoustic guitar track. The result was revelatory. The orchestral version felt overwrought, as if the music was trying to convince the audience that the moment was important. The acoustic version felt honest, as if the moment was important on its own terms and the music was simply giving it space to breathe. I switched to the acoustic version permanently, and the audience response improved significantly.
What Music Does That Nothing Else Can
The deeper lesson of this progression is about what music actually does in a show. It does not accompany the performance. It does not decorate the performance. It shapes the audience’s emotional processing of the performance.
When there is no music, or when the music is generic, the audience processes the show primarily through cognition. They are watching, analyzing, evaluating. When the right music is present, a second processing channel opens. The audience is still watching and analyzing, but they are also feeling. The music provides emotional information that bypasses the analytical mind and goes directly to the limbic system. It tells the audience how to feel about what they are seeing, not through argument or persuasion but through resonance.
This is why the same routine, performed identically, can produce a polite response without music and an emotional response with the right music. The effect has not changed. The performer has not changed. But the audience’s emotional processing has been activated, and that activation transforms a demonstration of skill into a shared emotional experience.
Graham’s progression from general selections to concert quality is really a progression from thinking about music as a tool to thinking about music as a language. At the first stage, music is a tool that fills silence. At the second stage, music is a tool that creates mood. At the third stage, music is a language that communicates directly with the audience’s emotional system, telling a story that runs parallel to the story you are telling with your words and your effects.
I am somewhere between stages two and three. My music choices are now intentional and emotionally motivated, but I have not yet achieved the seamless integration where every musical moment in the show connects to every other musical moment in a unified emotional arc. I am working on it. It is, I suspect, the kind of work that never really finishes.
But the distance between where I started and where I am now is vast. And the audience can feel it. They may not know what changed. They may not be consciously aware of the music at all. But they leave my shows now with a sense of having experienced something, not just having watched something. And I believe the music is the largest single factor in that transformation.
Where words fail, music speaks. I spent years learning to use words on stage. I am now learning that the moments where I stop speaking and let the music take over are often the most powerful moments in my show.