The Classics -- Their Place in Magic

This may ruffle a few feathers and raise a few hackles, but as you read this, you may find some inspiration for new respect for the classics and new understanding of why they are important.

I won't name all of the classics. I doubt that any two people would come up with the same list of effects or routines to be placed on such a list. But we could start with

The Egg Bag
The Linking Rings
The Cups and Balls and its relatives, such as the shell game
The Cut and Restored Rope
The Coins Through The Table

These are the older classics.

Modern Classics (relatively speaking) might include
Matrix
Perfect Time
Professor's Nightmare
Card to Wallet
Ring Flight
Out of this World
Ambitious Card
Invisible Deck
Spellbound.

There are others, of course. The items on the first list are all centuries old. The ones on the second list are things that were either invented or became very popular during the 20th century. All of them have certain characteristics

1) The effect, if well presented is very strong.
2) They give the performer plently of leeway for interpretation
3) With a couple of notable exceptions, they require a certain amount of skill to perform well.
4) LOTS of magicians perform them.

It is very easy to perform any of the classics badly. It takes a lot of skill to do any of them well. But they all have their places in the great scheme of things magical.

Few performers do all of them at all, let alone well. Notable exceptions are/were Johnny Thompson, Charlie Miller, The Professor (performed most of them), Whit Haydn -- if I have left your name off the list, this is purely unintentional. Watching Johnny Thompson perform the Egg Bag for laypeople (and magicians!) is watching living art. He knows more about the egg bag than anyone else on the face of the planet -- and most important -- he knows how much of it to do!

That is one of the problems with the classics -- there are so many different ways to do them, that the performer must, of necessity, know when to stop. After the third cutting and restoration of the rope, the audience knows what's coming, so you need to have some kind of surprise at the end.

The cups and balls have a tradition of the surprise ending. If you can fit it into the cup, you can probably load it. So, once you have established that the balls are going to go wherever you want them to, do the loads. Do something different. A good example of this is Bob Read's Penultimate Cups and Balls.

The biggest drawback of the classics is the last characteristic I listed. LOTS of magicians do them. This is particularly true of the modern "fad" classics, such as Ring Flight, the variations on Perfect Time, and the Card to Wallet. These can be done by a person with absolutely no skill whatsoever. In fact, if you have $100 to spend, chances are you can have these three tricks in some version or another.

Where does this become a problem? Well, if you are a good performer and you have been doing these items for a long time, so much so that they have become "signature tricks" for you, it is very likely that you will run into this situation sooner or later.

You are working a strolling gig at a party. You come up to a group who want to see some magic. After you have warmed them up, you ask for a ring. Suddenly, one of the ladies (or more) says, "Oh! He's going to do that one where the ring dissapears and ends up in his keys! Don't let him have your ring!" This is a very common problem. Another that is almost as common is the person whose ring has been damaged or lost by an incompetent performer, but that is a subject for another topic.

If your repertoire consists of nothing but the classics, at some point you will have to start creating your own magic. Otherwise, you run the risk of becoming a "cookie cutter" magician. These are the guys that the booking agents will book in groups of five to work a large room, because they just want magic -- it doesn't really have to be great, you know. Their goal is to see that everyone in the room is entertained by at least one magician, for a few minutes. That's it.

So, what is the purpose of the classics?

One thing that should be said about the classics is that they should be a starting point.

Great pianists start with the classics of music. They learn Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, etc.

Some become great interpreters of just those composers. They may even find a way of expressing something new with the pieces they wrote. But the best ones eventually use those composers as a point of departure for their own material. Each of the composers I have listed, and there are hundreds more like them, were also great musicians who played their own music. But they built upon what others had done before.

If Chopin had played nothing but Bach during his recitals, he would have lost his audience. And he would have deprived us of his own genius.

Vernon was famous for his interpretations of the classics. But look at the body of material he created.

You need both. But you need to express yourself, too.

And if you start creating your own material, you won't have to worry about being the last guy to show up for the gig, only to find out that the rest of the guys are doing the same things you brought.

So, create something!

Continuing the analogy of the Classics and music:

The Inventions and Sinfonias of J.S. Bach are classics. So is Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. I love these works, especially when performed by someone who really understands them. I grew up around this kind of music. But if you go to a concert, and all you hear are "Invention #8 in F" and the Second Piano Concerto played over and over, you will probably tire quickly, unless at least one of the performers has done something innovative.

Bach's music is timeless. (side note -- I realize Bach did not write classical music. He wrote Baroque music. But the pieces are classics.) When we play them today, they usually sound much different from the way they sounded in his day. Our instruments are different, as is our normal temperament. When Wendy Carlos released Switched on Bach in which all the pieces were played on synthesizers and special tapes, the interest in Bach's music took an upswing. When MIDI became a part of every PC, more versions of the Inventions and Sinfonias were perpetrated, I mean, sequenced by musicians and non-musicians alike. Then these classics slowly went from highbrow, to middlebrow to lowbrow. Anyone with a computer could now punch in the notes on a sequencer, and in less time than it would take to acquire the skill to actually play them on the keyboard, they could have a mechanical copy that they "created" themselves. This was basically "color by number music." Did music survive MIDI. Yep! "Composing" by sequencer can become very boring if you aren't doing anything new.

I used to conduct a monthly meeting of people interested in MIDI. I even appeared on American Computer Enthusiasts, a PBS show about computers, showing how easy it was to use MIDI.

It's sort of like people who buy the latest DVD, learn a card trick badly, and then go out and perpetrate it on the public.

But magic has been around a long time and it will prevail.

Eugene Burger addressed the problem of "magical sameness" in his book The Performance of Close-up Magic in a cartoon in which several characters sequentially discuss their acts. The caption reads "Well, I open with the Chop Cup, then I do Coins Across, Matrix, Triumph, and I close with Michael Ammar's version of Card on the Ceiling." Is this your act, too?

These are all classics, but they have been done to death.

At the Magic Circle Centenary in London this past July, John Fisher was very adamant about not having people doing the same material on all the shows. He asked one internationally famous dove worker not to do doves. He also asked him not to do cups and balls. Why? James Dimmare was on one show with him, and Jason Latimer was doing his cups. There was also a fellow who did the cups as a street performer would to open one of the evening shows. Other performers, as well, were asked not to do certain things that were considered signature tricks.

This seemed a bit harsh to the people involved, but as a result, the dove/cups and balls worker actually came out ahead. He found depths of his vast knowledge that all of us wanted to see. And the shows were more varied than any other convention shows I have ever witnessed.