The virtuoso demands that composers placed on musicians at the end of the 1800s were but a foretaste of things to come in the twentieth century. Members of the orchestra were complaining that the music of contemporary composers was unplayable because of the enormous difficulty of complex orchestral writing styles. With the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre Du Printemps in 1913, it seemed that the limits of performability had been reached and that the music world was about to go over the brink. After a break in compositional flow during World War I, composers explored new, uncharted musical domains. In the 1920s and 1930s, some composers created intricate and complex avant garde music, demonstrating the ultimate limitations of human musicians. They did not know it at the time, but these pioneers were attempting to write electronic music before the needed technology had been invented.

After...