When Gavriil Musicescu sat down to compose his own setting of the Cherubic Hymn, he was not writing new liturgical poetry, he was adding one more voice to a text that had already been sung in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy for roughly thirteen centuries before he touched it. The hymn entered the liturgy under Emperor Justin II in the year 574, introduced specifically to accompany the Great Entrance, the solemn procession that carries the bread and wine to the altar before consecration, and it has structured that moment of the service in the same basic way ever since across every Byzantine rite church, Romanian Orthodox worship among them.
The text carries a built in musical logic that every serious setting, Musicescu's included, has to honor. It falls into two contrasting sections, a slow and contemplative opening evoking the choir standing in mystically for the cherubim themselves, followed by a more majestic, glorifying close as the procession reaches its culmination, a deliberate contrast between quiet and grandeur that composers across the centuries have used as the hymn's essential dramatic shape. Musicescu's version, still heard in Romanian Orthodox parishes today, is one instance of a much older continuous practice rather than an isolated nineteenth century composition, a fact that is easy to lose sight of precisely because his setting is the one most Romanian congregations actually know.