[1] Mokranjac's early output is mostly neo-romantic, but embroidered with elements of stylised folklore: such a stylistic orientation was forced upon young composers after the end of World War Two, when the ideology of Socialist Realism, “imported” from the USSR, was prescribed by the cultural officials.

Furthermore, Mokranjac's composition teacher Stanojlo Rajičić was a conservative, who insisted that his students should express themselves in traditional forms of absolute music (such as sonata-form).

A majority of his piano works have been written either in the form of the suite, or a cycle of miniatures; in both cases, they consist of a number of character pieces.

The piano works such as Etudes (1951–52), Two Sonatinas (1953–54), Fragments (1956) and Six Dances (1950–57) demonstrate Mokranjac's departure from neo-romanticism and its enrichment with elements of jazz and blues, of Bartok's “barbaro” style and Hindemith's neoclassicism.

However, Mokranjac aimed to achieve a coherent whole on the realm of the entire cycle, and the individual movements have precisely defined roles in the dramaturgy of the work.

Mokranjac's typical piano texture is multilayered: it is distinguished by “hidden” melodies in inner parts, dense polyphony, broken chords in open positions, and frequent pedals which contribute towards the static or ambivalent feel of the harmony.

Since the early 1970s Mokranjac has gradually transformed his style and achieved a synthesis of all compositional procedures that he had used in earlier decades with a new, refined, lyrical sound world, embroidered with elements of neo-impressionism and the New Simplicity.

Individual movements in these suites are written in free forms, and they are so intertwined and mutually dependent that they cannot be performed as separate character pieces.

[1] Suite-poem Intimacies is created in the shape of a massive arch, starting from the timid quasi-improvisational neo-impressionistic figurations in the first movement (paired with a quotation of Josip Slavenski's song “Water Springs”).

The piece then develops through a series of alternating slow and fast sections, which culminate in a very dramatic fifth movement, and then gradually decline towards the Coda.

While the second suite-poem from the year 1973, Echoes, shares a very similar formal and stylistic design with Intimacies, it nevertheless reveals a completely different side to the composer's personality: his quest for spirituality, roots, ancestral heritage, and his desire to use them as a shield against the external pressures.

Mokranjac does not attempt to illustrate or restore the religious service, but he recalls its constituent parts and demonstrates how they “echo” in his (sub)consciousness.

The programme note for the first performance of his Fifth Symphony quotes Mokranjac's words which could well apply to all his works from the final creative period: “The experience of darkness and light inside and around us, an attempted leap from the realm of reality into the astral world, occasional screaming in the dark, a realisation that a man, in a poet's words, is only separated from the cosmos by his skin – these are the ideas that form the basis of a dramatic plot of my Fifth Symphony.”[4] Vasilije Mokranjac enjoyed a reputation of being a tolerant and broad-minded professor, who did not force his students to write in any particular styles and was willing to support his students in their quest for novel means of artistic expression.

His most prominent students were the composers who are recognised as the first Serbian minimalists (and who later went on to form a fluxus-inspired group OPUS 4): Vladimir Tošić, Miroslav Savić, Miodrag Lazarov and Milimir Drašković.