Kant

Кант

Audio: Kant

The kant is a polyphonic hymn-song of the Ukrainian Baroque of the 17th–18th centuries, sacred or secular. A bridge between folk singing and professional choral music.

The kant is a characteristic genre of Ukrainian Baroque culture: a three-voice (more rarely four-voice) strophic song in which the two upper voices move in parallel thirds while the lower provides a harmonic foundation. Kanty, which spread to Ukraine in the 17th century through Polish influence, flourished among the educated “wandering clerks” and students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

By content, kanty were divided into sacred (psalmy — paraphrases of psalms and prayers) and secular (love, humorous, historical, didactic). It was the most widespread “intelligentsia” genre of its time, uniting folk song with assimilated European harmonies. The kant became the soil from which Ukrainian professional choral art grew — partes singing and the sacred concertos of Bortniansky, Berezovsky, and Vedel.

Cultural Versus

Kant

Sub-category:: folk

The kant is a polyphonic hymn-song of the Ukrainian Baroque of the 17th–18th centuries, sacred or secular. A bridge between folk singing and professional choral music.

40%similarity

Atonal Music

Sub-category:: classical

Atonal music is music without a clear tonal center, where all twelve pitches are equal. The revolutionary breakthrough of the early 20th century that discarded 300 years of tonal hierarchy.