The Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College is hosting the West Coast debut of The Electronic Music Plus Festival, now in its eighteenth year, during April 3-7, 1991 on the Mills College Campus in Oakland.

The Electronic Music Plus Festival is a travelling Festival that has been presented annually since 1970. During its long history, the Festival has presented 551 performances of new and innovative interdisciplinary work, and has featured some 319 composers, 49 choreographers, 47 film/video artists, 70 artists from other disciplines and 1,494 performers. Each year, the Festival has a new host, and the host organization becomes the producing organization for the Festival.

The Festival is a showcase for the work of emerging composers and other creative artists working with new and existing technologies in challenging ways. In order to draw an audience for this work, the Festival also features nationally and internationally known artists. An essential ingredient of The Electronic Music Plus Festival is the cross-pollination of ideas between creative individuals and groups across the traditional performing and fine arts disciplines, using sound as the central binding element.

This year's festival will feature five concerts of live electronic performances, three concerts of tape music and video (juried from responses to invitations sent to over 2000 composers and visual artists), a special meeting of our Seminars in Formal Methods series (a panel discussion on live electronics in performance among several of the invited composers and the public), a workshop on the innovative computer software package HMSL (which was developed at the CCM during the 80's), two performances by Composers in Residence at the CCM, and sound/video installation work at the Prieto Gallery on the Mills College campus. With the exception of the live concerts, all of these events are being offered FREE to the public.

The Festival will also broadcast new and experimental work to a much wider audience on the Pacifica Radio's flagship station, KPFA-FM. The broadcast area of KPFA (together with KPFB and KFCF) covers most of Northern and Central California, and many audiences for their creative and innovative arts programming number into the tens of thousands.

The Center for Contemporary Music at Mills has raised most of the special funding for this project, having received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts Presenters and Centers for New Music Resources Programs, from the Zellerbach Family Fund, Meet the Composer/California with funds provided by the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation, as well as staff, equipment, and facilities support from Mills College. Some information about the CCM is attached, describing our history, current activities, staff, and facilities.