The religious tone of John Tavener's music is highly personal, composed of condensed and distilled symbols, and exploring through structure and gesture the ineffable cosmic implications of the composer's Russian Orthodox faith. The Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God, like many of his liturgical and pseudo-liturgical works, relies on Trinitarian repetitions to lend a kind of divine perfection and reverent ceremony to its form.

Scored for a cappella choir, the Hymn was composed in 1985 as the second part of a pair of Marian devotions. The first, Hymn to the Mother of God, takes its text from St. Basil's feast during the Lenten season; its tripartite polychoral canon was composed in memory of the composer's mother. The Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God compliments the canonical writing of the first hymn with lucid textures and unobscured lines. Its compact text is taken from the Feast of the Dormition (or slumber) of the Mother of God: "O ye apostles, assembled here from the ends of the Earth, bury my body in Gethsemane; and Thou my Son and God, receive my Spirit." This text is repeated a total of three times, each within a different musical setting.

The first iteration of the text is set to a chant-like melodic texture, hovering above a three-voice drone. The line forms graceful curves, gently ascending and descending almost entirely in stepwise fashion. The second iteration of the text utilizes the same careful line, but lays it on a mirror: while the women's voices sing the chant melody, the male voices follow it in exact inversion. This results in an unforgiving counterpoint that trembles with the shimmering dissonances of seconds, ninths, and tritones, and which answers the submissive descents at the ends of phrases with their intensified opposites. The third repetition of the text answers the simplicity of the first and the rigid angst of the second by surrounding the melody in lush chordal accompaniment spaced broadly between the extremes of the ensemble's range, and moving in parallel motion to the original line. This harmonic convergence continues up the very end of the work, where the outer voices expand in contrary motion to a widely-spaced cadence that never quite reaches its anticipated resolution.

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