I think it is an interesting topic. I was wondering how they will call music of XX century. Perhaps they will call it modern music. Than what is the name for XXI century music?
I think for the XXI century there are two trends emerging: music of complex nature, sometimes this music is very dissonant and involves used of new instruments and computers.
There is music that is more traditional in nature and much more simple. I would put minimalists in this cathegory.

I don't know much. I just want to continue this discussion.

One of the places I drop by periodically to see what might have changed is epitonic.com where I found, among other things, Ellen Fullman's "Harmonic Cross Sweep" which everyone else in the family thinks sounds like a circular saw.

I teach a class here at Northwestern Univ. called "Music of the Last Decade."  So, granted, the last incarnation of the class included music that went back all the way to 1996, but ... here's a quick list of the composers/pieces we covered .....

Week 1:      2.  Thürmchen Ensemble/Verlag (Carola Bauckholt, Erik Oña, Caspar Johannes Walter, Karin Haussmann);
Week 2:      1.  Peter Ablinger
          2.  Richard Ayres; Christopher Fox
Week 3:      1.  Richard Barrett : Dark Matter
          2.  Barrett, cont. (Opening of the Mouth, Vanity, solo works)
Week 4:      1.  Wandelweiser group (Jurg Frey, Antoine Beuger, Michael Pisaro, Thomas Stiegler, etc.)
          2.  Beat Furrer
Week 5:      1.  Bang on a Can (Julia Wolff, David Lang, Michael Gordon) and Totalism (Kyle Gann, Phil Klein, Lois Vierk, etc.)
          2.  James Saunders; Helmut Oehring
Week 6:      1.  Thomas Adès; George Benjamin
          2.  Hanspeter Kyburz; Matthias Pintscher
Week 7:      1.  Bernhardt Lang; Olga Neuwirth
          2.  Rebecca Saunders; Stefano Gervasoni; Chaya Czernowin
Week 8:      1.  James Dillon; Pascal Dusapin
          2.  Georg Friedrich Haas; Kaija Saariaho
Week 9:      1.  Young Composers 1 (Sam Mirelman, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Anthony Pateras, Jean-Francois LaPorte, Jennifer Walshe, Andrew Walsh)
          2.  Young Composers 2 (Vadim Karassikov, Wieland Hoban, Evan Johnson, Ming Tsao, Geoff Hannan, Andrew Hamilton)


I realize this is just a list of names and doesn't include specific pieces (except in the case of our own RB's Dark Matter, which, I must report, broke a speaker in my classroom), but ... it gives an idea of the sorts of recent developments I think might be useful for my students to know.  It's also worth pointing out that I intentionally avoided more 'established' older composers and their recent works.  Next year's version (if I'm still teaching ... but that's another story altogether) will include some of that stuff (recent Lachenmann, Ferneyhough, Sciarrino, Lucier, Birtwistle, etc.) & discussions of how the recent works differ from the older works.

If anyone is really interested, I'd be more than happy to send the full syllabus w/ pieces/readings/etc.

For kicks, I'll include a very quick and dashed-off list of a few works that I love that I think are particularly 'of their time,' works that could only be written (aesthetically, artistically, musically, historically, technologically, historiographically (?), etc.) in the 21st century, in some feeble effort to actually address the question at hand:

Peter Ablinger:  QUADRATUREN V ("MUSIK")
Richard Barrett:  Dark Matter
Jürg Frey:  2nd String Quartet
Richard Ayres:  No.35 (Overture)

and from my generation:
Sam Mirelman:  Study on the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1
Vadim Karrassikov:  November Morphology
Andrew Hamilton:  i like things
Jean-François Laporte:  Impression, pour violoncelle et surface ruguese


Goodness.  That's a pretty bizarre list.   ... I'm now determined to figure out what on earth these people/pieces have to do w/ one another.

Me too. I wish we had people like this here. We have absolutely nothing, but little squabals who is better. It is always better to talk to someone who knows what he is talking about and who is kindly disposed to other people and their interest, somebody who can pull musical community together, not saying : you are all worthless.
There is noone of a calibre to give any lectures here.

Cue Richard, and others perhaps, on the subject of improvisation in this context, I hope! Seems to me, from a relatively inexperienced point of view, that this (in all its variety of forms) has a potentially very powerful role to play in music of the immediate future, as it has increasingly in music of the near-past.

This is a vast area for discussion and there are all sorts of different ways of giving the performers a chance to participate in the compositional process. This is not necessarily particularly experimental or avant-garde - lots of music written for amateur ensembles is non-specific about things such as pitch so that parts can be played by whatever instruments are available.

My pleasure, GG.  Actually, I was feeling ashamed that my contribution was only a cut-and-paste job.  I still would like to spend some time writing a bit about the relationships b/t these various composers/pieces/etc.  In the course I taught, we spent quite a lot of time talking about what the various aesthetic links were b/t the works.

It's worth pointing out, as well, that I could probably come up w/ a syllabus for another 10 wk course on the same subject and have a completely different list of names, which says something all on its own.  But ... more on that another day.  Right now I get to go prepare a lecture on Barthes, Benjamin, and Borges.  Fun fun.  Almost as much fun as teaching classes about music since 1996.