Orlande de Lassus borrowed freely from every style and language of musical composition current in his day, and incorporated them all into his music. In his over 500 motets, he displayed a wide facility with styles and techniques. In some motets, he reflected the nuances of his texts in such a madrigalian fashion that theorist Joachim Burmeister could credit him with arousing real emotions (pathopoeia) and bringing music to life (hypotyposis). Elsewhere, Lassus wittily twisted the harmonic system of the day in the experimental manner of Cipriano de Rore. At the same time, he could confidently compose in the archaic cantus firmus styles of a prior generation (what James Haar calls Lassus the "historicist"). Published in 1569 at the height of his career in the Bavarian court, Lassus' five-voiced Christmas motet Resonet in laudibus falls closest to the latter category.

Style, text, and structure of Lassus' Resonet in laudibus all derive from an ancient yet popular Christmas song. The sprightly Latin tune may have been sung in German-speaking lands as early as the thirteenth century; at the latest, Leipzig musicians in the fifteenth knew it, and it was published in the same city in 1545. German Protestants sang a similar melody with the vernacular text Joseph lieber, Joseph mein, though Lassus set the Latin text for the Catholic tastes in Bavaria. Lassus divides his motet into three parts (known as a "perfect" and divine number), dropping to three voices for the central part and returning to full five-voiced textures to close; the Christmas song Resonet breathes throughout. In the first section, the tune serves as a mostly straightforward cantus firmus: it begins in the tenor 1 voice, but immediately moves to tenor 2 and remains there. Though Lassus' motet is in duple meter, the composer enlivens it by frequent allusions to the Resonet tune's triple meter. That tune's jubilant motion and simple harmonic character also inform these features of the motet. At the close of this first part, all voices burst into triple-meter passages. The central trio narrates the appearance of the Savior in Israel through the Virgin Mary; Lassus allows the cantus firmus to permeate all voices at one time or another. For the exultant close (beginning with "Great is the name of the Lord, Emmanuel"), he returns to the complete five-voiced texture, the strong tenor cantusfirmus and direct harmonic structure, and finally, a repeat of the triple-meter passage that ended the first part.

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