Soon after his voice broke, the young Spanish choirboy Tomas Luis de Victoria was sent to complete his education in Rome, studying music and theology at the Jesuit collegio for missionaries to the German lands. By the age of twenty-four, he was already publishing, via the esteemed Venetian printing house of Gardano, his first collection of music, containing thirty-three motets for four to eight voices. Of these, fully six became the models for his own later Mass compositions, including the five-voiced Pentecost motet Dum complerentur. The text paraphrases the New Testament narrative (from the second chapter of Acts) of the Pentecost after Christ's resurrection, when the disciples received the Holy Spirit and first spoke the praise of God in other tongues.

The proper liturgical form for this text, and the form followed by Victoria in his musical setting, is the Responsory—opening, Refrain, versicle, Refrain. A series of jubilant "Alleluia" sections audibly articulate this form. Both main sections of the motet begin with a variant upon the "classical" Renaissance Point of Imitation, which exposes a motivic unit in all voices in turn; Victoria, characteristically, crafts each exposition from an interwoven pair of motifs (the subsidiary motifs feature prominently in his Missa "dum complerentur". Internal divisions of text may or may not be clearly evident in the musical setting: both iterations of the refrain (beginning "tamquam spiritus vehementer," ["like a mighty wind"]) arrive unequivocally marked by a sudden change in rhythm and texture, while the text "et subito" ("and suddenly") in the first part of the motet sneaks in unnoticed in a few voices. The "Alleluia" which closes each Refrain sounds a long series of intertwined melismas, though all descend the scale melodically, which may be a musical evocation of the Disciples' worship under the influence of the physically descending Spirit.



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