Have you ever found yourself sitting around looking for something interesting to do for weeks on end, and then discover that three of your favorite artists or ensembles are performing your favorite pieces, and they’re all playing on the same exact night and you wish you could go to all of them?
That’s how it feels, when, after two years, there are three conferences — all of interest to us and our readers at Scoring Notes — happening at the same time: MOLA, NAMM, and League of American Orchestras. We’ll be at MOLA presenting sessions and talking to the best orchestra librarians in the business.
MOLA: June 3-6, 2022, Philadelphia
Here on the east coast of the US, in Philadelphia, the 40th annual conference of MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians (formerly the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Association) will get underway this evening, Friday, June 3, 2022, and run through Monday, June 6, hosted by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I’ve attended nearly every MOLA conference since 2014. Last year, at the 2021 all-virtual conference, my Scoring Notes podcast co-host and I gave a live podcast show in collaboration with MOLA entitled “Scoring Notes Live – Comparing the Major Music Notation Software Applications”.
This year, in Philadelphia, I’m very pleased that David and I will both be in attendance, in the same place at the same time! I can’t wait to see my good friend outside of “the matrix”.
Speaking of that, getting the right music to the right person, in the right place at the right time is the job of the principal librarian of the Philadelphia Orchestra, our friend Nicole Jordan. She’ll be very busy hosting the conference and keeping the regular series of Philadelphia concerts going, but if she has any spare time we hope to catch up with her.
David will be presenting a session called “(Y)Our Future with Digital Sheet Music” along with Mark Fabulich of the Boston Symphony (and chair of the MOLA tech committee) and Georgina Govier of the Welsh National Opera, where they will be discussing the developing technology of digital music readers and how it may change our workflows in the not-too-distant future. I have a feeling David can talk about that subject easily enough! It will be fun to hear the insights of the panel.
David and I will be giving a talk on “Advancements in Music Notation Software”; I suppose we could just play all of our podcast episodes from the past year at 50x speed to fit into the allotted hour, but instead we’ll try to summarize everything more calmly for the benefit of the assembled audience.
There are other very interesting sessions on the docket, including a few more that are tech-focused — one from Jane Cross of the Library of Congress on how to manage digital files, and another with Manly Romero of the Manhattan School of Music and Nishana Dobbeck of The United States Marine Band on project management solutions along with a demonstration of AirTable.
Oh yes — there is a concert of the fabulous Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center!
NAMM: June 3–5, 2022, Anaheim
On the other side of the country, in Anaheim, California, from Friday, June 3, 2022 through Sunday, June 5, the 2022 NAMM Show gets underway at exactly the same time as MOLA. I’ve had a blast attending the NAMM Show in the past, and covering it on behalf of Scoring Notes readers. In 2020, I zipped all around the convention environs and managed to talk to some of the most interesting people in our field.
Looking back at all of those photos and videos from January 2020, it’s surreal — none of us could have imagined the pandemic that was about to unfold and permanently change the course of history. Usually the NAMM Show occurs in January, well-spaced from the spring MOLA conference, but as a result of the pandemic, this year they’ve scheduled it this weekend instead, head-to-head with MOLA. The $61 round-trip Amtrak ticket from New York to Philadelphia made choosing to got to MOLA an easy call, but I hope to get back out to Anaheim in the future.
Will you be attending the NAMM Show this weekend? Please get in touch! I’d love to have some first-hand accounts of the show, especially as it pertains to music notation software and related technology. So snap a few photos and if we can get some reader-sourced coverage, it would be fantastic.
League of American Orchestras: June 1–3, 2022, Los Angeles
I don’t know if anyone is attending both NAMM and the conference of the League of the American Orchestras, which started on Wednesday, June 1, 2022 and wraps up today, but from a geographical perspective, other than the freeway traffic, this would have been an easy “two-fer” to do.
Hosted by our good friends at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in partnership with the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, the agenda for this conference is more management-focused, but there was an “innovation session” on orchestra repertoire as well as a roundtable discussion about the future of audio music distribution. If you attended, get in touch; we’d love to hear about it.
Meanwhile, we’ll report back from Philly as soon as we finish our pretzels and cheesesteaks. And don’t forget to tune in to the podcast tomorrow for an all-new episode on our new monthly release schedule!