Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was a Dutch organist, teacher, and composer.  He is widely considered to be the greatest of Dutch composers  and one of the most important figures in the development of keyboard music in the century before Bach.  Born in Deventer, he later succeeded his father as organist at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, where his family were organists continuously for almost one hundred years.  His compositions include keyboard and both sacred and secular choral music, though it is for his keyboard music that he is best known today.  Sweelinck was extremely influential as a teacher, especially of German students (including Scheidemann, Scheidt, Praetorius, and Hasse) who would propagate his compositional techniques far into Eastern Europe.

            In addition to his large body of keyboard works, Sweelinck produced well over 200 vocal pieces, the largest group being six volumes of Psalm settings in French.

            Hodie Christus Natus Es is taken from his second publication of Latin motets, the five-voice Cantiones Sacrae of 1619.  It is one of the most joyful of all Christmas motets, alternating dance-like triple-time sections for the word “hodie” with more measured episodes for the rest of the text. The straightforward harmony allows the composer to employ emphatic repetitions of melodic tags that, while not greatly sophisticated, embue the music with boundless optimism.  At the words “salvator apparuit,” Sweelinck indulges himself by setting them to a slowly ascending major scale in the bass, a typically madrigalian act of word-painting.