Silvina Milstein’s music explores musical forms arising from heightened states of awareness, borrowing from a wealth of artistic media and spiritual traditions.
These preoccupations are evident in her two works written for the London Sinfonietta – tigres azules, in which she explores the compositional potential of treating the 'present moment as an infinite dream', and surrounded by distance …, an exploration of the indefinable, yet seemingly precise manner in which musical shapes and configurations arise spontaneously as evocative appearances and illusory continuities. Her recent shan shui outlines a dream-like form, that relies on a small variety of gestures, which while sometimes behaving like traditional musical 'motives' can also unfold without the expectations of classical development, as if 'calligraphic brushstrokes' in ancient Chinese painting.
An important strand in her music is the use of evocative gestures that draw on the vernacular music of Buenos Aires, a trait that emerged in música ciudadana (1995) and a media luz (2000) as a means of furnishing a composition with a sense of modality.