NancyLebovitz comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
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An ad-hoc (more-or-less-)top-of-my-head sampler, if you're really curious (sorted alphabetically by composer and chronologically by work):
Babbitt: 1948, 1954, 1964, 1984 1992, 2003
Carter: 1955, 1980, 1971, rehearsal of a 1995 work
Crumb: 1970
Dillon: 1992
Ferneyhough: 1980, 1997, 2006, 2007
First: 1999
Murail: 1983
Ran: 1991
Westergaard: 1958, 2006
Wuorinen: 1971 1984, 1998
Folks like these are the intellectual (if not "cultural") heirs of the "standard canon". Some of them are as good as the three B's (most of them are at least at the level of say, Schumann or Mendelssohn), and all of them are currently living academics (or former academics).
(Then, in addition, there are the European non-academics like Boulez, etc.)
For what it's worth, I tried listening to Ferneyhough 2007, and the first few minutes were fascinating. It was as though the music was playing something in the back of my mind. And then I ran out of attention.
Is the sort of music you listed especially dependent on good reproduction, or is youtube enough for a fair sampling?
It's especially dependent on good performance, but I don't think recording quality is necessarily much more important than for works of earlier periods, at least above a certain minimum threshold. Certainly not for the works I listed, which I think are fairly represented by the linked recordings. (Excepting perhaps Carter's Variations for Orchestra, for which the audio is too soft.)