Orchestral Suite

A run of dances for orchestra, opened by a French overture

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An orchestral suite is a run of dances or character pieces for orchestra, usually opened by a French overture and held in one key throughout.

Origins and era

Seventeenth-century French court ballet and opera arranged dance sets for instruments, and Lully fixed the dotted French overture at the head. Germany turned this into the overture suite in the eighteenth century, and Bach's four orchestral suites are scored for strings, paired winds, trumpets and timpani. In the nineteenth century, theatre and ballet music was extracted into concert suites, a practice Grieg, Bizet and Tchaikovsky made popular. In the twentieth century Holst and Ravel used the suite to organise character movements.

What you hear

The ensemble is larger than a chamber suite, strings at the core, winds entering in pairs, with Bach adding three trumpets and timpani. Five to seven movements run from the overture through allemande, courante, gavotte, sarabande and gigue, with metre and tempo changing while the key stays put. The overture itself falls in two halves, a slow dotted introduction followed by a fugal fast section. Listen for the fixed rhythmic figure of each dance, then for how the scoring changes colour between them. Bach gives each suite one movement featuring a solo instrument, a solo flute throughout the second and first violins alone in the air of the third, so the set never becomes a flat list of dances. In later concert suites the plot decides the movements, and orchestration becomes the main thread.

Key figures

Lully and Bach established the overture suite, Telemann wrote dozens of them, Grieg and Bizet extracted suites from theatre scores, and Holst's Planets let a suite hold seven independent character movements.

Lineage

It descends from French court ballet and opera overtures and leads to the nineteenth-century concert suite, the ballet suite and the suite-like sequencing of film scores.

Common misunderstandings

An orchestral suite is not a medley of hits, because its movements obey conventions of key and dance type. Nor is it a symphony, since a suite does not build drama between movements and lets each section stand on its own.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Suite, 用于核对序曲组曲的乐章顺序
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 2, 用于核对法国与德国的两条源流

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.