Thomas Weelkes, with his contemporaries Thomas Tomkins and Orlando Gibbons, led an entire generation of English musicians. All three held prestigious posts as Cathedral organists, all three fed the popular demand for English madrigals, and all three further distinguished themselves in composing for the Anglican Church. The anthems and service music of all three men share a common ethos of exuberant and full-bodied polyphony, often using up to eight voice parts (the classic decani and cantori division of the English Cathedral choir). Their liturgical music also shares a restrained, but still highly active sense for text-setting, learned by each while writing madrigals. Yet within this homogeneity lies ample space for individual compositional personality. This is most evident in comparing different composers' settings of similar texts. Weelkes and Orlando Gibbons both left full anthems on the Messianic and regal text "Hosanna to the Son of David." Both deviate from the full Gospel text, apparently serving non-liturgical occasions; both use full textures of six or seven voices and seek splendid contrasts in sound. Yet Weelkes' Hosanna to the Son of David reflects a markedly different personality. Rather than directly quoting the Biblical acclamations of Christ's Triumphal Entry, Weelkes selects three verses and adds a peroration in Latin. This decidedly non-Anglican text, and the music's survival in four secular manuscript collections, suggests the composer was writing for some courtly event (much as Gibbons' Hosanna to the Son of David seems to indicate a royal celebration). While Gibbons set the text in an extroverted and jubilant manner, Weelkes imbues his Hosanna with more intense and personal devotion. Using his knowledge of musical pathos learned in the madrigal, Weelkes creates a dark yet resplendent little gem. His taut musical structure makes up three large phrases and the Latin conclusion; the text "Hosanna" serves as a recurrent refrain. Each of the three musical phrases opens with contrasting textures: the first with declamatory solo basses and a sweeping plagal cadence, the second with unified homophony on "Blessed be the King," the third with angular imitative motives on "Thou that sittest in the highest heavens." Weelkes infuses each phrase with waves of imitative sound, repeating single motives eight to ten times at regular intervals while the harmonies undulate in modal pathos. His modal tonescape reaches its climax in the final iterations of "Hosanna in excelsis Deo," with paired rising and falling motives that seethe forward to the final plagal cadence.

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