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I was lucky to witness a performance of George Crumb's string quartet Black Angels: 13 Images from the Dark Land (1970) a few years ago and it absolutely floored me. It was magical and terrifying experience and I may yet write my dissertation about the guy.

There are a few performances on YouTube but this is the best of them:

I - Departure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF8KSy7OBwA
1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects
2. Sounds of Bones and Flutes
3. Lost Bells
4. Devil-music
5. Danse Macabre

II - Absence http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhLU9A2ruMs
6. Pavana Lachrymae (Der Tod und das Mädchen)
7. Threnody II: Black Angels
8. Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura
9. Lost Bells (Echo)

III - Return http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAdNBly0ON0
10. God-music
11. Ancient Voices
12. Ancient Voices (Echo)
13. Threnody III : Night of the Electric Insects

The hand-drawn score is an absolute beast* a work of art all on its own (http://www.flickriver.com/photos/calsidyrose/5654660168/).

* fit this on your music stand... http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3603/3486945713_a04fc316e8.jpg

incredible stuff. fascinating man too. The Collection Vol.1 is a great place to start.

Strange bloke. Born in Arkansas but made the mistake of becoming a communist and ended up living in Mexico to avoid persecution. That's not the strange bit though. He got hooked on exploring the possibilities of the player piano (big, mechanical keyboard jobby that plays rolls of paper with holes punched in them) long after the market for that particular toy had died. He wrote around 50 studies for this ludicrously rare machine and, eventually (70s/80s), became the underground composer that the cool kids (Ligeti and chums) lauded.

Here are a couple of said studies:

Study for Player Piano No. 11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeQdqkvhKWQ

Study for Player Piano No. 25 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H53NM6qs4bw

There was a festival of Nancarrow's music at the Southbank Centre one weekend last year and seeing a few of the studies performed was surreal. A hall full of people staring at this machine as it gave out exactly what the composer intended (how often does that happen?), exactly as he heard it. And then the same people who glare when someone claps between movements, paralyzed at the thought of applauding a glorified music box. I clapped for the composer. The brilliant mentalist.

i am enjoying 'crippled symmetry' at the mo....a live recording of a very slowly evolving composition.

theres also a host of great stuff on the ECM label...

I actually run a blog which aims to cater for people just like yourself. We do short posts on pieces of 20th/21st century classical music with brief "listening guides".

As for definitive works, I would suggest:

Gyorgy Ligeti's Atmospheres http://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/gyorgy-ligeti-atmospheres/

or Luigi Nono's Como Una Ola De Fuerza Y Luz http://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/como-una-ola-de-fuerza-y-luz-luigi-nono/

We've also posted on Xenakis and Penderecki (all posts are organised alphabetically under the "index" tab). For something perhaps a little lesser known, but a brilliant piece and very much this sort of sound, maybe you should try Giacinto Scelsi's Anahit http://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/anahit-giacinto-scelsi/

Sorry if this self-promotion does seem a little cynical -- I'd just be happy if the blog found another appreciative reader!

kreng, jacaszek, deaf center, elegi, etc.
all kinda dark/neoclassical/ambient/noisy
https://soundcloud.com/miasmah
check em oot

then it's well worth looking at releases from NMC. They specialise in contemporary classical music, and have lots of the greatest composers based in the UK and also from abroad.

http://nmcrec.co.uk/

What's more, the NMC Music Map is quite brilliant for discovering composers that you like and other music which is similar. I've linked below with it starting at Xenakis, but you can search by any composer really and explore the various links.

http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/mmap/musicmap800.html?start=750

Recent stuff worth checking out (most of their releases are on Spotify) are recordings by Oliver Knussen, David Sawer, Tansy Davies, and Kenneth Hesketh.

but I have just made a series for the BBC about precisely much of this music. Starting on BBC4 on February 12th. More info here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2013/sound-fury.html
Spans from Schoenberg up to present day, lots of performances of great music.

Discovered this modern composer type about a year and half ago, and he has rocked my world.
I would recommend A Rainbow in Curved Air (1967), In C (1968), and Shri Camel (1978) for starters, as I find they're the most accessible ( the Oslo lll album, a live recording from 67, that quite frankly freaked the shit out of me in parts!). He also did an album with John Cage in 1970 called Church of Anthrax that's also worth a listen.
and just to give you some idea of what you're getting yourself into:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QE2CEh66gTg
Nice thread, and good listening!

Some really cool electro-acoustic/early experimental work.
http://editionsmego.com/releases/recollection-grm/

Agreed, it's largely only going up to about the '80s. I had only three hours to cram in the whole of the 20th c. Quite a task. So I am the first to admit it can never be comprehensive, but there's Schoenberg, Webern (impeccably performed by Aurora Orchestra), Ives, Varese, Xenakis, Stochkausen, Ligeti, Messiaen, Cage, Feldman (an obsession of mine), Riley, Reich, Glass, Meredith Monk, Part and a bit more up to John Adams. In an ideal world of course I would have killed to have made this more comprehensive or to have brought it right up to the wire with Thomas Ades, or Tristran Murail or indeed even the fringes of our electronic world with Aphex or the amazing William Basinski. And had the time to look at, for example, Pierre Schaffer or Hans Werne Henze. Etc etc. So apologies in advance for all the omissions ... all I can say is that I hope it's a decent primer to the bigger figures of modernist music. It's unlikely that I'll get the chance to delve further (this is expensive to make) but who knows? And thank you everyone for your interest.