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Suspensions and non-harmonic tones create dissonance and require smooth resolution as part of overall voice leading. A suspension must be prepared (held from previous harmony), sustained (creating dissonance), and resolved (usually downward by step). Other non-harmonic tones like passing tones and neighbor tones must fit smoothly into the voice leading without creating awkward jumps. Treating non-harmonic tones as integral to voice leading rather than as ornaments ensures that the entire texture remains coherent.
Identify all suspensions and non-harmonic tones in a Bach chorale, noting how they are prepared and resolved. Then compose progressions featuring 4-3 and 7-6 suspensions, ensuring the resolution moves smoothly to the next chord tone.
A suspension is one of the most carefully managed events in tonal voice leading: it takes a consonant note from the previous chord, holds it into the new chord where it becomes momentarily dissonant, and then resolves by step to a consonant tone of the new chord. The three-stage label captures the mechanics precisely — preparation, suspension, resolution — and each stage has a strict requirement. The preparation stage means the suspension pitch must appear as a consonant chord tone in the preceding harmony, so the listener has already heard it in its stable context. When it is then retained while the bass and other voices move, it creates a dissonance that is coherent rather than arbitrary — the listener recognizes it as "belonging" to what just happened, now in conflict with what is happening now.
The preparation is what makes suspensions feel expressive rather than simply wrong. The dissonance is *earned* by the consonance that preceded it: you introduced the note in a stable context, then kept it just long enough for the harmony to move underneath it, creating a collision. The 4-3 suspension names the intervals against the bass: the suspended note is a fourth above the bass, which was the third of the previous chord in many standard progressions; it resolves down to the third, which is the consonant chord tone that "should" have been there from the start. The 7-6 suspension works the same way: the seventh above the bass hangs over, then resolves down to the sixth. In each case, the resolution corrects the dissonance by moving down by step to where the voice "should" have gone from the beginning.
The resolution must move downward by step in standard practice. This reflects perceptual logic: the suspended pitch is heard as too high relative to the new harmony (it still belongs to the previous chord), and the resolution corrects this by descending to the expected chord tone. Upward resolution is rare and marked — it typically occurs only when the suspended pitch is the leading tone resolving to the octave, where the upward pull is even stronger than the downward resolution tendency. When composers delay the suspension's resolution (either extending the dissonance or adding ornamental figuration before the step-down), they intensify the listener's expectation and the eventual relief when the resolution arrives. The expressive power of suspension lies precisely in this withheld resolution.
Non-harmonic tones more broadly — passing tones (filling a stepwise gap between two chord tones), neighbor tones (a step away and back), anticipations (a chord tone arrived at early) — work on the same underlying principle: they are pitches that sit outside the current chord but are justified by their linear context. The key insight for voice-leading is to think of each vocal line as having two layers simultaneously: the harmonic skeleton (the chord tones that define the harmony at each moment) and the melodic surface (which includes non-harmonic tones moving between those chord tones). Analysis strips away the melodic surface to reveal the harmonic skeleton; composition adds the melodic surface back in, using non-harmonic tones to create smooth, logical motion between the structural chord tones. A Bach chorale, analyzed this way, reveals that almost every non-chord tone has a clear functional role — none are decorative in the casual sense, all are integral to the voice-leading logic of the texture.
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