The Cherubikon is not one text on all days. On Holy Thursday it yields to the communion hymn Of Thy Mystical Supper, on Holy Saturday to Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, a text from the old Liturgy of St James that passed into English hymnody in the nineteenth century and is now sung, to the French tune Picardy, in churches that have never celebrated a Byzantine liturgy, and at the Presanctified Liturgy of Lent to Now the Powers of Heaven. These substitutions are the exceptions that display the rule, each replacement doing the Cherubikon's work, silencing the earthly in the presence of the heavenly, in the register of its own day.
Musically the hymn has been a summit of Orthodox composition for centuries. Byzantine chant elaborated it into settings of great length and ornament, and the Slavic tradition made the Cherubic Hymn a genre of its own, with Bortniansky's settings becoming fixtures of the Russian repertoire, Tchaikovsky composing three within his liturgical works, and Rachmaninoff crowning the line in his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Because the chant covers a liturgical action rather than filling a fixed span, composers write into an elastic silence, and choirs measure their singing to the procession, music, movement and theology fitted together as closely as anywhere in Christian worship.