“Many serious Russian composers of Shoot’s generation, let alone his contemporaries who were younger, took care to write music in a way that placed them in a particular camp of the day. […] Shoot’s work never belonged to any of these camps. And if his music seems always to have been his own, at times hardly even appearing at all as part of this larger picture, then perhaps this was because already early in his career he had found a most unusual voice of a kind quite unlike that of the majority of other composers in the world to which he belonged”.
—Gerard McBurney, Liner notes to the CD of Shoot’s selected Orchestral Music, Sojuz CD 2002