During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the gestation period of Stravinsky's music grew longer and the peregrinations of movements from work to work grew more circuitous. Les noces, for example, went through three different versions over eight years, while the eight movements of the Three Easy Pieces and the Five Easy Pieces for piano duet migrated to become the two Suites for small orchestra.

The Suite No. 2 takes its first three movements from the Three Easy Pieces of 1914 - 1915 and its fourth movement from Five Easy Pieces of 1916 - 1917. The order of the Three Easy Pieces movements was March, Waltz, Polka. In the Suite No. 2, Stravinsky added the Galop from the Five Easy Pieces to complete the set. Stravinsky orchestrated the movements that make up the Suite No. 2 in 1921 at the request of a Paris music hall that was looking for accompaniment to a stage sketch. He tells an amusing story about the Suite No. 2 in his Chronicle of my Life: "Although my orchestra was more than modest, the composition as I wrote it was given only at the first few performances. When I went to see the sketch again a month later, I found that there was but little left of what I had written. Everything was completely muddled; some instruments were lacking or had been replaced by others, and the music itself as executed by this pitiful band had become unrecognizable."

Scored for two flutes, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, one horn, two trumpets, one trombone, and one tuba with piano, percussion, and strings, the Suite No. 2 represents Stravinsky's music in its lightest and most high-spirited mood. The polka was cited by the composer as one of the earliest examples of his emerging Neo-Classical tendencies. Although rhythmically syncopated, occasionally harmonically or melodically dissonant, and stylistically fractured, the Suite No. 2 is among Stravinsky's most amusing works.

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