Silvestrov is best known for his
postmodern music, some of which is also considered
neoclassical. Using traditional tonal and modal techniques, he creates delicate tapestries of dramatic and emotional textures, qualities he feels are often lost in contemporary music: "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists." In 1974, pressured to conform to
socialist realism and trends of
modernism, and to apologise for his composers' meeting
walkout protesting the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Silvestrov withdrew from the spotlight and began to reject his earlier modernist style, composing the
Silent Songs (
Тихі Пісні, 1977) cycle for private performance. After the Soviet Union's fall, he composed spiritual and religious works influenced by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music. He traced his rejection of avant-garde techniques to his Kyiv Conservatory years, when Lyatoshynsky asked, "Do you like this?", a question he said was "ingrained in my soul". His recent 70-minute
violin and piano cycle,
Melodies of the Moments (
Мелодії Миттєвостей), seven works with 22 movements, is intimate and elusive. He describes it as "melodies ... on the boundary between their appearance and disappearance". Elements of
Ukrainian nationalism occur in works like
Diptych, which sets the words of
Taras Shevchenko's prominent patriotic poem "Testament" ("Заповіт", 1845) to music for chorus. He dedicated it in 2014 to
Serhiy Nigoyan, the Armenian-Ukrainian
Euromaidan activist killed in the
2014 Hrushevsky Street protests, perhaps the first of the
Maidan casualties that led to the
Revolution of Dignity. ==Works==