It has been my experience over the years that I have been drawn to certain musical works, to listen to them over and over again, and eventually to study them in detail to understand what it is about them that engages me, in essence to understand in concrete terms what my musical intuitions have already grasped. Some of Bach's suites—here I would cite specifically the first two violin partitas; the first, third, and fourth cello suites; and the keyboard partitas—are among this ever-expanding list. What I have found about these and other works to which I have been drawn is that they are particularly rich in harmonic, motivic, and structural associations, and it was curiosity about the extent to which these relationships might be exhibited throughout the forty-four suites that led me to this study. That is, do all the suites exhibit inter-movement connections of the variety I had perceived in, say, the first cello suite and the second violin partita? The answer, of course, is negative. There are some that appear to exhibit no such relationships, some with a variety of discernible connections, and others that exhibit a diverse, and sometimes complex web of inter-movement associations, some easily perceptible but others less obvious except to the trained ear. Personally I am drawn to those in this last group. The more complex the better. But this should not be taken as a value judgment. The baroque suite is a collection of pieces in the same key, and there are many wonderful examples by Bach that are just that. Consider some of the suites I have not discussed, including some of the English and French suites. These too are fantastic works, equally worthy of our attention.

It should not come as a surprise that many of Bach's suites do exhibit inter-movement associations, given the tradition from which he came. He learned his craft in part by studying the music of preceding generations, often copying complete works or making arrangements of them. As noted in chapter one, he made a keyboard arrangement (BWV 965) of the first sonata, actually a partita, from Reincken's Hortus Musicus (1687).