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Hello all,

Just wanted to let you know about a post I made in the composers forum. I wanted to write a baroque suite for students who were interested in the Bach suites but not quite ready for them. If this description fits ay of you, please check 'em out and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Thanks! I don't know whatyou mean by Bach suites, but I will practice your songs because I just started playing the piano and I don't like those folk songs in the books because they are so .. "lame." Sorry if that offended any one, but I am just expressing my opinion.

Very nice, Kreisler! I liked the gigue the best.

I can't print these out with adobe reader. When its printed out it shows triangles and weird stuff.

Kreisler, thank you for posting these. I'm polishing Petzold's Minuet in G at the moment, which has been a marathon effort for me, so these are ideally timed. I'll start working on one of them today and will post again when I've got something sensible to say.

I recently bought William Gillock's "Little Suite in Baroque Style", it will be interesting to compare them.

A suite is the 16th/17th century equivalent of a dance album/CD.

It's a collection of little dance pieces... sort of like today we have certain kinds of dances like break dances, square dances, snowball dances, line dances... in Bach's day they had allemandes, courrantes, gigues, bourrées, etc.

Bach wrote 6 "French" Suites and 6 "English" Suites... these are sort of like the Beatles' "Red" Album, "White Album", etc... the "English" and "French" names don't really mean much.

I thought French suite referred to the fact that Bouree & Minuet & Gavotte, etc, all have french origin. Unless English suites use the same names. I'm not sure. Though I like Baroque music, I haven't studied enough of it....

Nope; the English Suites use the same names.

The dances have different origins... some from France, some from Germany, some from Italy, some from Spain...

It was sort of a fashion to name things in either French or Italian... notice all of the tempo indications, for example, are mostly Italian. German was not seen as an artistic language, which is why German opera composers such as Mozart wrote almost all of their operas in Italian, not German. (This changed during the 1800s.) It's also why German composers such as Bach used French names for the dances in their Suites.