With "A Love Supreme" (Impulse), the album-length suite of 1964, he created his defining work.
In her evening-length suite "Samhära," Sen draws from both forms to create a complex hybrid.
His instrumentation on "Elements of Light" (Rough Trade), a five-part, album-length suite, includes a 50-bell carillon — a three-ton instrument — along with electronics and percussion.
A mugham is a symphonic-length suite, full of contrasting sections: unmetered and rhythmic, vocal and instrumental, lingering around a single sustained note or taking up a refrain that could be a dance tune.
In an entirely different vein, the company of the scholarly ballet choreographer Christopher Caines presents "The Exquisite Hour," part of an evening-length suite not yet premièred, set to art songs by Gabriel Fauré, performed live.
(Anderson 20110602 Corbin Dances (Wednesday) In "Shady," Patrick Corbin, a former Paul Taylor dancer, presents an evening-length suite of dances that the Joyce Web site describes as exploring "community, humanity and sexuality".
As the sessions wore on into 1967, the record, intended as a kind of album-length suite, or, in Wilson's famous description, "a teenage symphony to God," began generating impossible-to-justify buzz — this was going to be the record that revolutionized pop, a 12-inch vinyl messiah.
At 8 p.m., Theater 80, 80 St. Mark's Place, East Village, (212) 388-0388, theatre80.net; $15. (Jack Anderson)20110609 CorbinDances (Friday and Sunday) In "Shady," Patrick Corbin, a former Paul Taylor dancer, presents an evening-length suite of dances that the Joyce Web site describes as exploring "community, humanity and sexuality".
In the heyday of progressive rock, the cherubic voice of Jon Anderson and the pummeling odd-meter riffs of Yes could fill even a song about a traffic circle with cosmic import, and the band was ambitious enough to write 20-minute songs and album-length suites.
Mr. Rygg seems to love the liminal moment when American songwriters first started to rise up and get symphonic or baroque or truly pretentious, before it could be done more easily, with album-length suites for free-form radio, 24-track recording and deeper record-company budgets.
At about half its length, this suite of eight dances would have been a playful introduction to Mr. Smuin's sunny, well-trained dancers and their easy way of blending jazz-dance struts with ballet bourrées.
