Partes singing (from the Latin partes — “parts,” “voices”) is a style of church polyphony that replaced the single-voiced znamenny chant. The choir was divided into parts (from 3 to 12 and even 48 voices!), which created a splendid, solemn sonic architecture — the Orthodox answer to Western choral polyphony.
The centres of this art were Kyiv, Lviv, the brotherhood schools, and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The theorist Mykola Dyletsky set out the rules of partes composition in his “Grammar of Music” (1677). In the second half of the 18th century the choral sacred concerto grew out of the partes concerto, and its summits are the works of Dmytro Bortniansky, Maksym Berezovsky, and Artemiy Vedel, which still sound today in churches and on concert stages as a pride of the Ukrainian musical heritage.
