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.
