As an invited participant in the pilot conductor-composer summer program (Conductors Guild), I learned first-hand about what ancillary aspects surrounded ‘difficult’ choices in scoring I’d made in one of my chamber-orchestra pieces.
The program paired 5 composers with 5 conductors; each composer conducted (everything from Haydn to Bartok to their own music); every conductor composed (my partner wrote an 8-minute tone poem). It was one of the most revealing experiences of my professional life, and has changed my methodology of ‘vetting’ a piece myself before I let it leave my desk.
(It also had an unexpected payoff: Six months after that summer the same piece of mine I’d struggled with at the podium won a national prize. The conductor of the prize orchestra let me know before the dress rehearsal how hard he found it; we discussed, and the options finally were to pull the piece, or have me conduct. So I wound up in my second – and final ! – time on a podium leading my own music. Partially because several members of the orchestra had performed, or recorded, other music of mine, they helped to cue internally, and we managed to pull the thing off. ~ I had several sleepless nights beforehand, though, imagining the worst… just like before my high school physics midterm. )