suite

(swēt)

1. A staff of attendants or followers; a retinue.
2. 1. A group of related things intended to be used together; a set.
   2. () A set of matching furniture: a dining room suite.
3. A series of connected rooms used as a living unit.
4. Music.
   1. An instrumental composition, especially of the 17th or 18th century, consisting of a succession of dances in the same or related keys.
   2. An instrumental composition consisting of a series of varying movements or pieces.
5. Computer Science.
   1. A group of software products packaged and sold together, usually having a consistent look and feel, a common installation, and shared macros.
   2. A group of procedures that work cooperatively: The TCP/IP suite of protocols includes FTP and Telnet.

[French, from Old French. See suit.]

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For more information on suite, visit Britannica.com.

A group of items. Pronounced "sweet." See application suite.

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noun

1. A group of attendants or followers: entourage, following, retinue, train. See over/under.
2. A number of things placed or occurring one after the other: chain, consecution, course, order, procession, progression, round, run, sequence, series, string, succession, train. Informal streak. See order/disorder.

An ordered set of instrumental pieces meant to be performed at a single sitting; in the Baroque period, an instrumental genre consisting of several movements in the same key, some or all of them based on the forms and styles of dance music (other terms for the Baroque groups of dances include Partita, Overture, Ordre and Sonata da camera).

The practice of pairing dances goes back at least to the 14th century, but the earliest known groups called ‘suite’ are suyttes de bransles by Estienne du Tertre (1557). These, however, constitute the raw material for a dance sequence rather than a sequence that would actually be played. Most dance groups from the 1540s to the end of the century are pairs, a pavan or passamezzo with a galliard or saltarello. The impulse towards suite-like groupings seems to have emanated from England at the turn of the century, with William Brade and Giovanni Coprario, but the first publication of suite-like groupings as uniformly constituted composite works was Peuerl's Newe Padouan, Intrada, Däntz und Galliarda (1611), where the title's four dances recur in ten ‘suites’ united by key and thematic material. Schein's Banchetto musicale (1617) contains 20 sequences of paduana, gagliarda, courente, allmande and tripla, similarly unified.

The development of the ‘classical’ suite, consisting of allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue in that order (A-C-S-G), took place in two stages. The initiative for the A-C-S group probably lay with the Parisian lutenists or the dancing-masters of the French court; the first such groups that can be firmly dated occur in the Tablature de mandore de la composition du Sieur Chancy (1629). The gigue enjoyed only scattered acceptance when it began to appear in suite formations after 1650, and at first it rarely assumed its classical position at the end. Froberger left only one authentic A-C-S G suite; his usual structure of A-G-C-S was altered by his first publishers in 1697-8, by which time the norm had been set for German composers by Buxtehude, Böhm and Kuhnau. In England the suite with gigue was exceptional (the gigue does not appear in Purcell's suites, for example), and in France during Louis XIV's reign it was common in viol and harpsichord suites to follow the A-C-S-G group with other dances. Features of the French harpsichord suite of L. Couperin, D′Angelbert and others include the Prélude non mesur ée and the tendency to bring together existing pieces (sometimes by a different composer). There are only five more or less classical suites among François Couperin's 27 ordres - in nos. 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8, each consisting of five to ten pieces. The others include programmatically linked groups and miscellanies.

The French also used the ensemble and orchestral suite, the latter often composed of pieces from diverse sources (especially Lully's operas and ballets). Many began with an overture, and the ‘overture-suite’ was enthusiastically taken up by Germans, including J.S. Kusser, J. C. F. Fischer and Georg Muffat. Telemann claimed to have composed no fewer than 200, but Bach's four orchestral suites and Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks show the genre at its best.

In their other suites both Bach and Handel usually followed the pattern prelude-A-C-S-X-G (where X is one or more extra dances or dance pairs). Handel's keyboard suites, numbering about 22, are mostly compiled from pieces which already existed. Bach showed more interest in the genre, with six cello suites, three partitas for solo violin and sets of six English suites, French suites and partitas for harpsichord. Bach uses the suite as a building-block in a larger whole, arranging each one to do something different - or the same thing in a different way - so that the set is a kind of thesaurus of the suite for that particular medium.

After 1750 the sonata, symphony and concerto began to fill the suite's functions. To write a suite became an archaic exercise, as with Mozart's k 399/385 i and the much later suites à l′antique of Ravel, Debussy, Strauss, Hindemith and Schoenberg. In the 19th century the title ‘suite’ was increasingly used either for an orchestral selection from a larger work (especially a ballet or opera) or for a sequence of pieces loosely connected by a descriptive programme (e.g. Holst's The Planets) or by an exotic or nationalistic one (as in some of the suites of Grieg, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov). Independence from dance forms means that the genre can be said to encompass works to which the title ‘suite’ was not given, including Schumann's piano cycles, Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces and Stockhausen's Momente.

A connected group of rooms arranged or designed to be used as a unit.

A group of related pieces of music or movements played in sequence. In the baroque era, a suite was a succession of different kinds of dances. In more recent times, suites have contained excerpts from longer works, such as ballets, or have simply portrayed a scene, as in Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

• Types of Music and Composition - suite: instrumental music in several movements, each in a different dance form, all in the same key

Look up suite in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Suite may refer to:

• Suite (music), a set of musical pieces considered as one composition
• Suite (hotel), a type of hotel room
• Suite (address), a kind of address or location in an office building, shopping mall, etc.
• Suite (geology), a collection of rock specimens from a given area or a succession of closely associated sedimentary strata
• Personal suite or retinue, retainers in service of a dignitary
• Software suite, a collection of software of related functionality
• Three-piece suite, a furniture set of sofas and chairs
• "Suite", a poem by Patti Smith from Babel

See also

• Secondary suite, an additional separate dwelling unit on a property that would normally accommodate only one dwelling unit
• Suite PreCure, a series of the Pretty Cure anime franchise

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - suite, møblement, følge

Nederlands (Dutch)
suite, gevolg, groep bij elkaar horend dansen (muziek), compositie met aantal samenhangende delen, set van meubilair, set samenhangende computerprogramma's

Français (French)
n. - mobilier, suite (chambres), (Mus) suite, suite (d'un prince)

Deutsch (German)
n. - Suite, Garnitur

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - σουίτα, διαμέρισμα, συνοδεία, ακολουθία, (μουσ.) σουίτα, (Η/Υ) πακέτο προγραμμάτων

Italiano (Italian)
suite, seguito

Português (Portuguese)
n. - conjunto (m)

Русский (Russian)
набор, комплект, сюита, номер-люкс (из нескольких комнат)

Español (Spanish)
n. - suite, apartamento, juego, séquito, comitiva, cortejo, acompañamiento, serie, sucesión

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - svit, följe, uppvaktning, möblemang, uppsättning, omgång, serie

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
随员, 随从, 一套家具, 套房, 系列, 组, 套

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 隨員, 隨從, 一套家具, 套房, 系列, 組, 套

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 일행, 한 벌

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - ひと続きの部屋, スイートルーム, 1そろい, 組曲, 随行者, 一続きの部屋

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) شقه , جناح‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מערכת חדרים, מדור, מערכת רהיטים, דירה, פמליה, סגל, סוויטה‬

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