In his long career serving the most prominent churches in Rome, the heart of the Catholic world, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina produced volumes and volumes of practical music for the Catholic liturgy. Some publications collected his complete settings of particular genres: Hymns for the complete liturgical year, Offertories for the complete liturgical year, music for the special rites of Holy Week. But even in the "catch-all" publications like his numerous books of motets, Palestrina left to Christendom a wealth of practical music for both major and minor holidays throughout the Church year. For a major feast such as Christmas, he often wrote numerous settings; he gave the jubilant Christmas Antiphon Hodie Christus natus est at least two settings. The better-known of the two, which is for eight voices, appeared in his 1575 printed collection of motets. Palestrina himself apparently enjoyed this joyful setting enough that he also composed a Christmas Mass, the Missa Hodie Christus, on his own motet.

As always, Palestrina's music strives for balance among all of its facets. He disposes his eight voices in two choirs that balance the higher and lower registers of musical space. Both the smaller units of his melodies and the proportions of his large-scale phrases similarly breathe balance and careful crafting. The composer even softens the surprise of some textural changes by prefiguring them: the first choir itself breaks into two pairs of antiphonal voices before the second choir enters, the first bass sings a brief melisma just before all voices imitate a longer one on "the Savior appears," and even the change in meter is prepared by rhythmic syncopation prior to its arrival. Despite these musical concessions to balance and "perfection," however, Hodie Christus natus est breathes exhultation in the birth of Christ. From the fanfare of the opening sequence of high major chords, the tone of joy is set. Every phrase builds to dancelike repetitions of "Noe, noe" ("Noel" itself being a vestige of French carol dancing). Throughout, Palestrina manipulates the alternation between low and high choirs to the best effect; once it even serves the text, as "This day on earth" (low choir) "the angels sing" (adding high choir). After all eight voices sing "Glory to God," the final "Noe" passage dances even more, breaking into triple meter.

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