I'm not just talking about students whom I personally supervise, but the research students in the department I work in as a whole, many of whom have been there longer than I have. In the other two countries outside the UK I've lived in for numbers of years, Germany and Holland, there are well-established festivals of or venues for improvised music which are at least on the level of financial and audience support as the equivalent events and places for contemporary notated composition (and often they're the same events and places as well, which is perhaps going to be the case at the Huddersfield festival in the future). It goes without saying that all kinds of non-commercial music are marginalised in relation to commercial music, but I don't see any emergent trend towards worsening or improvement in this situation: on the one hand, there's the enormous attention given to a declining number of musical personalities whose work can be readily assimilated by the market and sold using the language of advertising; on the other hand there's the technology that allows us, among other things, to have this very discussion across the Atlantic and across various other less geographical social boundaries.

I think Evan's point about notation becoming the result of a conscious decision rather than being a default position is rather important: if nothing else, such a development might encourage those who use notation to think more deeply about its nature and potential (and indeed limitations). Present company excluded, selbstverständlich.

I'm a bit late with this observation owing to late calls in the day job. Evan's pertinent stuff about notation
and Ian's note about software reminds me of a score I heard by an advanced student at the RAM some
years ago- I think no less a persoange than Ligeti was in the audience and Gary Howarth was conducting.
Anyway, the half-time score was totted up in the crush bar, and I recall someone saying that this very
intricate piece was written for the samples on the (Sibelius) software rather than live performance. Given
the aforementioned scarcity of 2nd performances, especially full orchestral scores, I thought this was
poignant and ... I guess now, futuristic. Film composer graduates, like the one I met on the train the other day hungry for work, routinely use string synthesiser programmes and ones like Garritan are incredibly intricate of nuance.(His is, also rather poignantly, called "Vienna")

I don't think it is your Yankeeness, as I don't get it either. Sounds a bit like some obscure soccer or cricket jargon...

I wondered if it might be worth collectively making some sort of list of the most interesting 21st century works (say, simply those written, or mostly written, after January 1st 2000) that we've heard or seen? Here's a handful from my favourites (in no sense a complete list in that manner, just some things that come immediately to mind):

Barrett - Dark Matter, faux departs, lost
Birtwistle - Theseus Game, The IO Passion, Night's Black Bird
Dillon - The Book of Elements (books 2-5), Andromeda, Fourth String Quartet
Dusapin - À Quia, Perelà, homme de fumée, Faustus, the last night
Ferneyhough - Shadowtime, Fifth String Quartet, Plotzlichkeit
Finnissy - Kapitalistische Realisme, Le Demon de l'Analogie (chapters from the History of Photography in Sound written after the date in question, though parts of these were sketched beforehand).
Lachenmann - NUN, Concertini
Sciarrino - Macbeth

Ian,

Year 2000 was the 100th year of the 20th century. 

Would that rule out any of your list? 

Ah, but quartetone, there was no cypher (0), for the first year BC, so each century starts with year 1, not year 0. ;-)

Well I did, and at a party dedicated to the occasion, too.