I’m now at the point in my career where I’m regularly conducting pieces for the second, and I gotta say, it’s pretty great.

Don’t get me wrong—I love adding pieces to my repertoire, and I’d say at least 50% of what I program is new to me. But I’m understanding the wisdom of my teacher David Effron, who used to say that conducting a piece for the first time was “pure hell,” and that the first time was really the 0th time.

[It turns out Mr. Effron said a lot of things that, 10 years down the line, I’m finding to be true, for example, that the reason he loved conducting concerts so much was that that was the only time when nobody could bother him with a question or complaint.]

It’s not that you work less the second time you conduct a piece—much to the contrary. It’s that the work that you starts at a much deeper level. You’re able to focus on the rich inner life of the piece without having to master the technical details of who enters where and what’s a divisi and what’s not.

Plus, you’re not struggling with the ‘aural ideation’ the second time through, that process of imagining the sound of the music by reading the dots on the page. After you’ve conducted a piece once, its sound is lodged in your head in a way that it can never be just from listening to recordings or playing it in an orchestra.

Although that’s not quite true. Because as I come back to these pieces, I find so many new details that I’m shocked I missed on the first pass. So the real, complete sound of the score isn’t really in my head, but some baseline version is, onto which I can build.

And it’s not just the details—it’s the big picture too. It’s like going to a new location for the first time; it always takes longer than you expect, and you’re looking for the street signs and navigating the traffic flow. But when it’s a road you’ve trod many times, you know innately where you’re going, so you can enjoy the trip and spot the little surprises along the way.

All this makes me eager to do more pieces for the second time, but also to do more for the first time, so I can get to the second time sooner.