Baroque Suite

The Baroque suite is a collection of stylised dance movements in a single key — typically allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, often with a prelude and optional galanteries such as minuets and gavottes — that formed the principal instrumental cycle of the Baroque era. Standardised in the lute and harpsichord music of seventeenth-century France and Germany, it reached its summit in *Bach*'s English Suites, French Suites, Partitas and the suites for solo cello and violin, and in *Handel*'s keyboard suites and orchestral "Water Music". The dances are abstract: courtly in origin, they had long ceased to accompany dancing.