The classic Glee is "essentially a work for unaccompanied men's voices, in not less than three parts...simpler [than the madrigal] in texture, less sophisticated in design, and generally based on the simplest kind of diatonic harmony".
[5] The part song was soon established as more suitable for mixed-voice choirs, its development marked by increasing complexity of form and contrapuntal content.
[7] Early British composers of part songs include John Liptrot Hatton, R. J. S. Stevens, Henry Smart and George Alexander Macfarren, who was renowned for his Shakespearean settings.
Around the turn of the 20th century in the heyday of the part song, Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Edward Elgar were the principal exponents, often bringing a high-minded seriousness to their settings of great English poetry both contemporary and from earlier epochs.
More recent major contributors to the genre include Ralph Vaughan Williams, Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax, Peter Warlock, Gustav Holst and Benjamin Britten (his Five Flower Songs of 1950).
About half a century before the advent of a party part song, the old hook notation began to be replaced by a non-linear one, close to the modern one.
According to the themes of the texts and the predominant musical means, the part songs are divided into two large groups: vivatno-panegyric (glorious) and lyrical-dramatic (repentant).
Examples were composed by Amy Beach, Dudley Buck, George Whitefield Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Henry Hadley, Margaret Ruthven Lang, Edward MacDowell and Horatio Parker, and more recently by Randall Thompson and Elliott Carter.