# Composers who composed layers upon layers?



## ericdxx (Jul 7, 2013)

Sorry for being so brash despite not being a member of this board for very long.

Richard Wagner and Gioachino Rossini strike me as two composers who realized the layers of orchestral music. Mozart to some extent but not really.....


I'd love to hear your recommendations of pieces from composers who composed layers upon layers in complex pieces!

Thanks in advance!


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky, R. Strauss, Schreker, Respighi, Herrmann, Williams...


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Bruckner piled up layers of rhythms on top of each other. In one section, he has something like five different rhythms going at the same time.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Mozart? Rossini? Rimsky-Korsakov? Maybe I don't know what is mean by "layers". For my ears, someone like Scriabin fits this description - ideas are piled so high that after a while it's incomprehensible. Ives did it so, especially in the fourth symphony. Composers like Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart are easy to listen to because they keep the music so clear and clean - transparency, in other words. Havergal Brian is another one whose textures become so dense that it's hard to keep track of it all.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Layers are not all equal. There's been a professor of music psychology, David Huron at Ohio State, who analyzed Bach keyboard fugues to answer the question of how many independent voices there actually were. He found that the number is three -- in the four- and five-voice fugues the "extra" voices beyond three are actually not independent -- they're doublings, pedal notes, rests, etc. With orchestral music I don't know if someone has done such an analysis. I've encountered the idea of a threefold foreground-middleground-background in orchestration, but that is only one of many aspects concerning orchestral texture.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I'm not sure I quite know what you mean, but if anyone "probably" did it, it was Mahler.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Much of the music written by Ligeti is concerned with texture and timbre within a multi-layered approach. It explores gradual chromatic movement with multiple parts, the parts being layered to create a dense sonic field, utilizing broad register range and timbre diversity,

In _Lontano_, for example, you encounter repetition of an idea or motif over and over again with each repetition played by a different instrument. By displacing their starting point, the idea/motif becomes layered over itself many times and yet each instrument never plays the idea in unison with another.

In _Atmospheres_ the polyphony is so densely layered that all individual lines are obscured and a cloud like texture results.

Ligeti writes, "Both _Atmosphères_ and _Lontano_ have a dense canonic structure. But you cannot actually hear the polyphony, the canon. You hear a kind of impenetrable texture, something like a very densely woven cobweb."


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

Ives wins this contest. It is in the 20th c. that one finds the fullest amd most sophisticated exploration of layering as a musical texture. Berio, Carter, Ligeti all spring to mind. Stravinsky in certain works (mainly in his Russian and late periods.)


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

ericdxx said:


> Sorry for being so brash despite not being a member of this board for very long.
> 
> Richard Wagner and Gioachino Rossini strike me as two composers who realized the layers of orchestral music. Mozart to some extent but not really.....
> 
> ...


Your comment about Wagner makes me want to suggest Wolfgang Rihm's requiem, Et Lux.


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

I would also add Varese, particularly his big orchestral works Ameriques and Arcana. This is kind of music that treats individual orchestral components as sound elements that may be layered as fit. These works were written in the 1920s! Ahead of their time.


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## Knorf (Jan 16, 2020)

SeptimalTritone said:


> I would also add Varese, particularly his big orchestral works Ameriques and Arcana. This is kind of music that treats individual orchestral components as sound elements that may be layered as fit. These works were written in the 1920s! Ahead of their time.


Good call! I agree.


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## Azol (Jan 25, 2015)

Couldn't resist


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Schnittke. He includes quotes from Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1 (around 41:45) amongst other works.






This is pretty layered for a film score.


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## BenG (Aug 28, 2018)

3:41 the most impressive layers of Rhythms here. Gunther Schuller says "There is nothing like it in even the rite of spring".


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Reger, maybe? After all, he was fugue-obsessed.


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## Sequentia (Nov 23, 2011)

As has been remarked, the notion of a "layer" in music is very vague, but I would single out the following 20th-century composers as ones who made extensive use of musical simultaneity (which in 20th- and 21st-century music often takes the form of clashing tonalities, polyrhythms, or even compositional strategies): Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Sorabji and Nancarrow.

Edit: Also, Godowsky deserves to be mentioned, if only for the works in which he combined two or more Chopin études.


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## EmperorOfIceCream (Jan 3, 2020)

Again, it depends on what you means by layer, but Xenakis was another composer who used lots of individual lines simultaneously and was just interested in the overall "stochastic" effect rather than having any clarity in several of his pieces.


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