On a cool winter evening, at the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood, California, a magician from Hong Kong stepped onto the stage to the eager applause from a room full of formally dressed patrons of the illusory arts. He popped a balloon with a butterfly knife and produced a bottle of wine with an explosion of sparkles. The audience cheered. The magician then proceeded to pop a CD into a stereo system on stage and began to do an act with 3 coat hangers, linking them together only to unlink them in a bewildering demonstration of modern dance, begging the question of how, and more importantly, why?
Upon the final cadence in the music, the coat-hanger act ended cleanly and the audience responded with a polite ovation. The master magician then happily moved on to his final illusion in the set: he took off his coat to cover the stereo, motioning to make it vanish... except it didn't.
Some members of the audience still gave him an encouraging applause, but the energy in the room instantly dropped. That was when the master magician called me onto the stage.
"We have a problem." The magician said.
"There are no problems." I replied, "Only solutions."
"The music is screwed up." He explained.
"I noticed."
There was a silence in the air the seemed to resonate with the chirping of an imaginary cricket. But the show must go on.
I sat down at the piano and began to play a Chopin waltz, the one in C# minor that was in rondo form, so I could adjust the length of this accompaniment to the magician's routine accordingly by adding repeats.
I played while keeping the magician's performance in my periphery vision, accenting the notes when I felt it coincided with the magic effect and adjusted tempo to land cadences with the prestige.
The show did go on... and ended with the audience applauding to the magician's tricks. But deep down I know, it was the magic of music that did the trick this time.
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