From NYTimes.com:
Calling your new-music festival Darmstadt Essential Repertoire is a conscious provocation on multiple levels, as the New York composers Zach Layton and Nick Hallett surely realized when they chose the name. It alludes to the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, a venerable and formidable German laboratory for avant-garde innovation, known for dogmatic (and sometimes rancorous) adherence to modernist severity.
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