There is a passage in Fitzkee’s Showmanship for Magicians that stopped me cold. He compares a bare trick to a piece of sheet music — notation on a page, nothing more. The trick is not a finished entertainment item, he argues. It is merely something to perform. The real work begins when the performer studies it, interprets it, and creates an arrangement that brings it to life from the spectator’s point of view.
He uses the example of Andre Kostelanetz conducting “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Kostelanetz does not just play the notes. He considers tone quality, timbre, mood, phrasing, contrasts in tempo and volume. The result is his expression of his interpretation. The sheet music is identical for every conductor. The performance is not.
I read that analogy in a hotel room in Salzburg, sometime around midnight, and it restructured how I think about every show I have ever put together.
The Mistake I Was Making
For the first year or so of building my show, I thought my job was to perform tricks well. Execute them cleanly. Get the moves right. Hit the moments. I treated my set list the way a beginning piano student treats a recital piece — play the notes in order, don’t make mistakes, and hope for the best.
The result was a sequence of technically competent effects with no connective tissue. Each trick stood alone. When one ended, the next began. The audience watched politely, reacted when something surprised them, and forgot most of it by the time they reached their cars.
I remember performing at a corporate event in Linz — one of my earlier keynote-adjacent shows — and feeling afterward like something fundamental was missing. The tricks had worked. The reactions had been decent. But the whole was less than the sum of its parts. There was no arc, no momentum, no feeling that the audience had been taken somewhere and brought back.
I could not articulate what was wrong until I read Fitzkee’s conductor analogy. Then it clicked: I had been playing the notes. I had not been conducting.
What Conducting Actually Means
A conductor’s job is not to play an instrument. The orchestra plays the instruments. The conductor shapes the experience. Tempo, dynamics, when the strings swell and the brass pulls back, where the crescendo builds and where silence does the heavy lifting. The conductor sees the whole while the musicians see their parts.
Applied to magic, this means the performer’s job is not to execute individual tricks. The tricks are the instruments. The performer shapes the experience those tricks create for the audience. That means controlling:
Dynamics. Not every effect should hit at the same volume. Some moments need to be loud — big visual productions, gasps, applause breaks. Others need to be quiet — a moment of genuine connection with a volunteer, a pause before a revelation, a whispered aside that draws the audience in. If everything is at the same emotional volume, nothing stands out.
Tempo. The pacing of a show is not constant. It accelerates and decelerates. You start at a certain speed, build momentum, pull back before a major climax, then unleash it. Fitzkee talks about gradually slowing your tempo as you approach a climax — each successive effect starting slightly slower and retarding more at its peak. The overall feeling is a controlled deceleration that makes the final punch land harder.
Emotional arc. This is the big one. A well-conducted show takes the audience on a journey. It starts somewhere, moves through terrain that surprises and delights, and arrives somewhere that feels inevitable in retrospect. The audience does not just watch ten tricks. They experience a single event with a beginning, a development, and a climax.
The Difference Between a Playlist and a Symphony
Think of it this way. A playlist is a collection of songs. Each one may be excellent on its own. But when you hit shuffle, the experience is random. A power ballad follows a dance track follows a jazz standard. No momentum, no arc, no emotional logic.
A symphony is also a collection of musical ideas. But they are arranged — deliberately ordered, deliberately paced, deliberately shaped so that each movement leads to the next and the whole creates an experience that no individual movement could achieve alone.
Most magic shows are playlists. The performer has ten tricks they can do. They put them in some order — usually opening with something visual, closing with something strong — and perform them sequentially. The tricks may be excellent. But the show is a collection, not a composition.
The conductor’s mindset changes this. Instead of asking “What tricks do I have?” you ask “What experience do I want to create?” Instead of arranging tricks by difficulty or by method, you arrange them by emotional function. What does each piece contribute to the arc? Where does it sit in the dynamics? What contrast does it provide to the piece that came before?
How I Started Conducting My Show
The shift happened gradually. After absorbing Fitzkee’s analogy, I started mapping my set differently. Instead of a list of tricks, I created what I think of as an emotional score — a diagram of where I wanted the audience’s energy and attention at each point in the show.
I would draw it on hotel stationery: a horizontal line for the runtime, a vertical axis for intensity. Then I would plot where I wanted peaks and valleys. The opening needed to grab attention fast — not my biggest effect, but something that established energy and personality. The middle needed variation: a moment of humor, then a build, then a quiet piece that created contrast. The close needed to be the highest peak, arrived at through a deliberate climb.
Then I would fit my material to that score. Not the other way around. I was not asking “Where does this trick go?” I was asking “What does this moment in the show need?” Sometimes the answer was a trick. Sometimes it was a story. Sometimes it was a pause.
This is what Fitzkee means when he says to plan your act starting with the climax and working backward. You decide where you want to end — the emotional peak, the final punch — and then you engineer the path that gets the audience there. Everything in the show exists to serve that journey.
The Orchestration of Contrast
One of the most powerful tools a conductor has is contrast. A fortissimo passage hits harder when it follows a pianissimo one. A fast movement feels faster after a slow one. Silence, used deliberately, is one of the most powerful sounds in music.
The same applies to magic. A big visual production lands harder when it follows a quiet, intimate moment. A comedy piece provides relief that makes the subsequent serious effect feel more serious. A moment where nothing seems to happen — where you simply talk to the audience, or where a volunteer shares their reaction — creates space that makes the next effect feel larger.
I learned this the hard way at an event in Vienna. I had stacked three strong effects back to back to back, thinking more power meant more impact. The result was numbing. By the third piece, the audience was saturated. They had nowhere left to go emotionally. The third effect — which was genuinely my strongest — got less reaction than the first because I had not given the audience room to recover and rebuild.
After that, I restructured. I put breathing room between my peaks. I added a quieter mentalism piece between two visual effects. I let a story carry a moment instead of forcing another trick into the slot. The same material, rearranged, produced a dramatically better experience.
Why Most Performers Stay on the Page
It is easier to play the notes. Conducting requires you to step back from the material and see the whole, which is difficult when you are also the one performing. It requires you to make hard decisions about material you love — sometimes cutting a strong trick because it does not serve the arc, sometimes placing your favorite effect in a less prominent position because the show needs something else at that point.
Fitzkee is blunt about this: “No matter how much you love the trick, no matter how well you can do it… throw it out permanently” if it does not contribute lift. That is the conductor’s discipline. The sheet music does not decide the arrangement. The conductor does.
Most performers resist this because they are attached to their material. They spent months learning an effect. They spent money on the props. It gets good reactions when performed in isolation. So they include it, regardless of whether it serves the show. This is like an orchestra conductor including a great violin solo in the middle of a percussion piece because the soloist practiced hard. It does not belong. Skill is not the criterion. Fit is.
The Strategy Consultant Parallel
This concept translated directly from my professional life. In strategy consulting, we have a concept called “the narrative arc of a presentation.” You do not just present data in the order you gathered it. You construct a story. You open with a hook — a provocative finding, a surprising statistic. You build through evidence. You create tension by showing what is at stake. You resolve with a recommendation that feels inevitable.
The data does not change. The order and emphasis change everything.
When I recognized that building a magic show uses the same architecture as building a strategy presentation, the whole craft became more intuitive. I was not learning a new skill from scratch. I was applying a skill I already had — narrative construction, audience management, emotional pacing — to a different medium.
The Conductor’s Toolbox
Here is what I think about now when I arrange a show:
The opening sets the tone. It tells the audience what kind of experience they are in for. It needs energy, personality, and a reason to pay attention. But it does not need to be the biggest effect. A conductor does not start with the finale.
Each piece serves a function. Not just “this is a card trick” or “this is a mentalism piece.” What emotional purpose does it serve? Does it build? Does it release? Does it create contrast? Does it advance the relationship between me and the audience?
Transitions are compositions, not gaps. The space between effects is not dead time. It is where the conducting happens. A story that bridges two pieces, a shift in energy, a moment of connection with the audience — these transitions are the mortar that holds the bricks together.
The climax is earned, not declared. You cannot just do your best trick last and call it a climax. A climax is the peak of a journey. The audience needs to have traveled somewhere to feel the arrival. If you have not built to it — through rising tension, through contrast, through emotional investment — your closer is just another trick at the end.
What I Am Still Learning
I am not a great conductor yet. I still catch myself defaulting to the playlist approach — putting tricks in an order that makes logistical sense rather than emotional sense. I still sometimes prioritize method over meaning, worrying more about whether a particular sequence allows for clean resets than whether the emotional arc flows properly.
But the framework is now permanent. When I sit down to prepare for a keynote or a corporate event, I no longer start with “What tricks am I going to do?” I start with “What experience do I want to create?” That single shift — from player to conductor, from sheet music to arrangement — has changed more about my performances than any individual trick ever has.
Fitzkee wrote this in 1943. The sheet music analogy. The conductor as the model for the performer. The idea that a bare trick is just notation waiting for interpretation. Eighty years later, it remains the most useful framework I have found for understanding what separates a collection of effects from a show.
The notes are not the music. The tricks are not the show. You are the conductor. Act like one.