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For most purposes my favorite period of music coincides with Igor Stravinsky's lifespan. (Actually some really pretty stuff came out of the generation before Debussy, people like Gounod, Faure and d'Indy. But Debussy's La Mer was this incredible watershed, where whole new worlds became possible in its wake, and Stravinsky was a pioneer in many of those worlds.)
Misconceptions about the 20th century include the idea that it's all about noise. I would say that it's all about expression, as was the music of the Romantic period (which in some ways we're still in), but what we have to express is different. In particular, the generation that lived through the world wars had some pretty horrific stories to tell, and pretty, harmonically well-behaved music just wasn't going to tell those stories properly. So that's philosophically where you get the dense chords of Bartok, the banshee timbres of Varese, the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern (which last, I admit, is a little too stark and close to the bone for me-- although I really like, and recommend, Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra opus 16, from early in his career, and his A Survivor from Warsaw, from the end of it).
The last composer I really liked was Olivier Messiaen, who died in the '90s. He'd been in the French Resistance during the war, and got captured by the Nazis. Apparently they had a special prison camp for intellectuals, so they stuck Messiaen in there with other talented people, including a really well known violinist, a cellist, and a clarinet player. Somehow they acquired instruments, even a piano for Messiaen to play, and he wrote this piece called the Quartet for the End of Time. You might think, coming from a prisoner of war, it'd be either a snarl of defiance or a cry of despair, and there is some of that in there, but most of the music is in fact serene and achingly beautiful (albeit weird), long droney placid melodies reflecting the composer's conviction that God would provide. Highly recommended.
Since he died I know of no living composers I would recommend, or purchase new music by without hearing it first. Of course it's real hard for new composers to get access to orchestras anyway, so we'll never hear enough new symphonic music to capture the zeitgeist. Unless you want to talk about John "Star Wars" Williams, and I don't.
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