This early work by PŠrt is in a style differing considerably from the austere, mystical pieces that gained him international fame since his exile to West Berlin by the Soviet authorities in 1975. This symphony's nickname gives the clue to its style: It is a dense web of many individual instrumental lines, owing a lot to church polyphony of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. This interest in old church music may eventually have led to the more familiar style PŠrt adopted later, but this symphony sounds very little like this later music.

While the prelude is somewhat less contrapuntal than the canon or the fugue parts of the symphony, the entire work is based on the twelve-tone system. This system is designed to generate continuous dissonance and atonality, though PŠrt often spaces the individual parts so as to generate some sense of harmonic movement and even a melodic quality. This creates an unusually strong tension and drama, far removed from PŠrt's later serene feeling.

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