Mykola Pavlovych Dyletskyi (c. 1630, Kyiv - c. 1690, Moscow) was a Ukrainian music theorist and composer. He was the author of the work Musical Grammar (1675), which teaches the basics of partes singing.
He was born in Kyiv around 1630 (Dyletsky's biographical dates can only be estimated). He was educated at the Jesuit Academy of Vilna, and his musical teachers were probably the Ukrainian musicians Mykola Zamarevych and Martyn Melchevskyi. As a regent and teacher of church singing, Dyletskyi worked in Vilnius, Smolensk, and, from the 1670s, in Moscow. He was probably the regent of Hryhorii Stroganov's Moscow choir, as he dedicated the Moscow edition of his Grammar to "To the noble, to the eminent, to his eminent master Gr. Stroganov".
Creativity
Dyletskyi is little known as a composer. However, his works, published in 1981 by the Musical Ukraine publishing house, show that Mykola Dyletskyi was one of the most prominent composers of partes music. S. Smolensky considers Dyletsky to be the creator of a whole school of Western singing. Indeed, as a theorist and pedagogue, Dyletsky created a school from which a number of prominent composers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries emerged.
"The Grammar of Muscovite Song"
A quintuple circle in M. Dyletsky's Muscovite Grammar, Moscow edition, 1679
Mykola Dyletsky's Grammar of Musik (full title: "Grammar of Muscovite Music or the Rules of Muscovite Music in Muscovite Syllables, with Six Parts or Divisions"), first published in Vilna (this edition has not yet been found), rewritten in Smolensk in 1677 and in Moscow in 1679. Ukrainian scholars believe that the work was originally written in bookish Ukrainian, but later the author made a number of translations into Russian to spread the work (a facsimile edition of one of the manuscripts was published in 1979 in Moscow by V. Protopopov).
In 1723, the Grammar was also rewritten in St. Petersburg (the date and place are indicated on the title page), but the origin of this manuscript, now kept in Lviv, has not been finally clarified. A facsimile edition of this so-called "Lviv" manuscript with transcription and dictionary was published in 1970 in Kyiv (Musical Ukraine Publishing House) under the title Grammar of Music (compiled by Oleksandra Tsalai-Yakymenko).
The first printed edition of the Grammar was published only in 1910.
"Dyletsky's Grammar was the first of the music-theoretical treatises that explained in detail the technical essence of the linear, note system, partes singing, and partes composition. In this work, Dyletsky defended the "free" methods of composition, considering music as an art that is creatively alive and emotionally significant. "The Grammar was in fact also the first work to summarize musical theoretical knowledge, which had been acquired mainly through the oral tradition. The terminology he established was established for a long time in the theoretical and pedagogical practice of schools and composers and was of great practical importance and contributed to the fruitful work of many singers and regents in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
"The Grammar of Musik is considered the first surviving scientific work to describe the Quintuple Circle.
