As the 2026 MOLA Conference opens today in Sydney — hosted by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra — the organization is also announcing where it will convene next year: the 2027 annual conference will take place April 30 – May 3 in San Francisco, co-hosted by the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, and San Francisco Opera.
And with it comes a new Tech Fair.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be serving as the independent producer and programmer of the 2027 MOLA Tech Fair — setting the agenda, schedule, and content from the ground up. The fair will take place on Friday, April 30, 2027, the opening day of the conference. Call it Tech Fair 2.0.
What the Tech Fair is
For those encountering it for the first time: MOLA: An Association of Performance Librarians is the professional organization for music librarians at orchestras, opera companies, ballet companies, and other performing arts organizations worldwide. These are the people who acquire, prepare, catalog, and distribute the music — every score, every part, every digital file — that gets performed on major stages. They are, by necessity, conversant with music notation software, digital score reading, optical music recognition, music data formats, publishing tools, and everything in between. Scoring Notes readers will find a lot of common ground.
The Tech Fair was created to give technology its own dedicated day at the MOLA conference — not just a product demonstration table in the corner, but a full-day engagement with where the field is going. It has now run three times: in Berlin (2023), Cleveland (2024), and Ann Arbor (2025). I helped create the first one and have played a central role in all three. In my post from the 2025 conference, I described it as “the end of Tech Fair 1.0.”
The 2027 fair will be something different.
Tech Fair 2.0
What’s changed is both structural and philosophical.
Structurally, the 2027 fair deliberately separates two things that previous fairs sometimes conflated: commercial exhibition and intellectual programming. Exhibitors, vendors, products, and tools will be present throughout the full four-day conference, Friday through Monday. But Friday — the fair — is the “ideas” day where we will focus on the bigger questions.
Philosophically, the fair is organized around a central framing: the score lifecycle is a cycle, not a line. The archive feeds the stand; the stand feeds the archive. Each generation of librarians inherits source material from the last and produces source material for the next. Technology enables this cycle at every stage — from digitizing archival materials, through preparing performance-ready parts, to preserving the output in formats the next librarian can actually use. The four sessions of the fair trace this arc.
The sessions
“From Source to Score” — How technology is changing the process of getting music from a physical or archival source into digital notation. AI audio transcription and AI-assisted optical music recognition are, at their core, two sides of the same coin. This session treats them as such — along with what practitioners are already finding when they put these tools to work.
“From Score to Stand” — Making performance-ready materials in 2027: notation tools, proofreading, part extraction, layout, page turns, cues, cuts, bowings. Forward-looking, not elegiac.
“The Long Game” — Structured data, formats, preservation, and the shared responsibility between librarians, publishers, and standards organizations. Future-proofing for the next librarian, who inherits everything being created today.
“The Unanswered Question” — The day concludes with a closing session and open discussion that earns its synthesis from the arc of the conversation that precedes it, posing hard questions the room might not have thought to ask, and drawing on work happening in adjacent fields.
Speakers and panelists are not yet confirmed. The session architecture is set; participants are being identified now.
San Francisco
San Francisco is a fitting setting for this kind of day. The city’s three major performing arts organizations — the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, and San Francisco Opera — are serving as conference co-hosts, and the proximity to the Bay Area’s technology community is not lost on anyone planning the programming. More on that as things develop.
Get involved
The fair is open to anyone — MOLA membership is not required to attend. Registration is handled by MOLA, and a modest fee will apply for non-members. If this community is yours, start planning now.
If you work in music technology, music notation, digital archiving, music publishing, music data formats, or adjacent fields — and you’re interested in exhibiting at the conference or participating in the fair’s programming — I want to hear from you. The audience is music performance librarians from institutions around the world, as well as a broader professional music and tech contingent, and the programming is being shaped right now. Reach out via the Scoring Notes contact page.
For organizations that convene around these topics — the W3C Music Notation Community Group, the MEI community, the MIDI Association, and others working at the intersection of music notation and technology — the fair is a natural occasion to schedule an adjacent meeting or community gathering. The right people will already be in the room, and San Francisco in late April is a lovely time to visit. Reach out if you’re thinking along these lines.
Companies with their own user communities should think along similar lines. Having your customers and potential customers attending the fair — and available for a dedicated gathering on another day of the conference — is an opportunity worth planning for sooner rather than later.
Scoring Notes will cover the 2027 Tech Fair in full, both in these pages and on the podcast. Watch this space!
How could this work with school music programs, church music programs?
Very cool. Would be nice to finally meet you in person Philip when you are in SF next year.