In a mid-seventeenth century letter to a colleague, an Italian theorist classified the variety of church music that was being written in Europe. He described one old-fashioned kind of vocal music, a second polyphonic vocal style but with organ and/or multiple choirs of voices, a third style of music for voices with instruments, and the most modern "hybrid" style. The most important churches and courtly chapels, such as that written for the highest feast days of Venice's San Marco, could thus partake of a large number of stylistic possibilities; the Venetian Doges and the Signoria of the city paid well for, and expected, the most advanced and interesting music to grace their state church. The church motets that apparently were Giovanni Gabrieli's earliest were published with music of his uncle Andrea Gabrieli and show their debt to his style: homophonic and syllabic writing predominates in all the alternating choirs of voices, often spiced with rich chromatic harmonies. By the time he was publishing his own collection of church music, the Symphoniae Sacrae of 1597, on the other hand, Giovanni was already moving toward the richer styles of a new century. His eight-voiced Pentecost motet Hodie completi sunt is a good case in point.

Hodie completi sunt is based on the simpler antiphonal style of his uncle, in which syllabic text-driven passages alternate nearly verbatim between the two four-voiced choirs. Yet right from the opening measures, Gabrieli inserts fresher musical air: both choirs begin with a kind of intonation on a tonic chord, but immediately break into short dance-like triple-meter phrases. The triple meter had long been a symbolic representation of the Holy Spirit (third member of the Trinity), but might have been as shocking as early in this motet as the tongues of Pentecostal fire descending on the apostles. Twice more triple meter interrupts the musical flow (rather than a more traditional single instance at the conclusion), both of them refrain-like "Alleluias." The remainder of the text tends to appear in lengthy polyphonic passages, enlivened by madrigalian emphases on certain words in the text (such as the virtuosic melismas on charismatum, spirit) or antiphonal reiterations of short phrases (most pointedly, the numerous repeats of "into all the world"). The madrigalisms, the melismatic vocal lines, and the resounding and extended final cadence all mark Hodie completi sunt as harbinger of a new motet style.

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