suite, inmusic, a group of self-contained instrumental movements of varying character, usually in the same key. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the period of its greatest importance, the suite consisted principally ofdance movements. In the 19th and 20th centuries the term also referred more generally to a variety of sets of instrumental pieces, mainly in forms smaller than those of thesonata, and included selections for concert performance ofincidental music to plays (e.g.,Felix Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare’sA Midsummer Night’s Dream [composed 1843] andGeorges Bizet’sL’Arlésienne suite [composed 1872]) and ballet music (e.g.,Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’sNutcracker suite [1892] andIgor Stravinsky’sFirebird suites [1911, 1919, 1945]).

The suite of related dance movements originated in the paired dances of the 14th–16th centuries, such as the pavane and galliard or thebasse danse and saltarello. Often the same melodic theme would be treated in different metre and tempo in the two dances. In the 16th and 17th centuries German composers often arranged three or four dances as a unifiedmusical entity, an early example beingJohann Hermann Schein’sBanchetto musicale (published 1617), a collection of suites of five dances for five viols.

In France the trend was to publish suites for solo lute or keyboard that were simply collections of as many as 17 or 18 pieces, almost always dances, in the same key. The French composers gradually transformed the dances into elegant, refinedcompositions, and the individual dancegenres developed distinctive musical traits. Usually the French composers gave their pieces fanciful orevocative titles, as in the ordres (suites) ofFrançois Couperin (e.g., the allemandeL’Auguste from Ordre I of his first book of harpsichord music).

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By the early 18th century four dances had become standard in the suite: theallemande,courante,sarabande, andgigue, in that order. This basic grouping had been established in Germany in the late 17th century afterJohann Jakob Froberger began to include a gigue either before or after the courante in the then common German arrangement of allemande, courante, sarabande. Froberger’s publisher later reordered the dances in thesequence that became standard.

By the mid-18th century the use of additional movements (galanteries), such as gavottes, bourrées, and minuets, and even of an air (a lyrical movement notderiving from a dance), was common, as was a variously entitled introductory movement; e.g.,prelude,overture, fantasia,sinfonia. Examples of such expansions of the basic four movements in the solo suite include J.S. Bach’sEnglish Suites,French Suites, andPartitas (partita was a common German term for “suite”).

Outside France and Germany the order and selection of dances tended to be less standardized. In Italy a suite for chamber ensemble or orchestra was commonly termedsonata da camera (chamber sonata). Particularly in Germany another type of suite also developed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This type included dances then modern rather than the four traditional dance types, which by then, abstracted and refined, had lost their immediate dance character. It opened with an overture in the French style; hence, suites of this type were often calledouvertures. Examples of this more flexible approach include the collectionsFlorilegia (1695, 1698) ofGeorg Muffat,Johann Sebastian Bach’s fourOuvertures for orchestra, andGeorge Frideric Handel’sWater Music (1717) andMusic for the Royal Fireworks (1749).