Chord Suspensions – What Are They & How Do They Work?

Click the play button below to listen to my podcast on musical suspensions:

Good morning. This is Duane with more Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know. Today, I’d just like to touch on one non-harmonic tone called suspension. Chord suspensions in popular music is simply where the fourth takes the place of the third in a chord. You know, a chord is a stack of thirds, a basic triad is, anyway, if you have it in a root position, that is. If you put the fourth in the place of the third, you have a suspension.

The simplest suspension would be like C-E-G, C-F-G instead of C-E-G. You simply replace E with F, the fourth with the third. Usually that resolves, but not always. (Duane Playing Piano) Usually a seventh is present with a suspension as well. A C seventh suspension would be C-F-G-B Flat wouldn’t it? (Duane Playing Piano) In any inversion … It doesn’t matter which note’s on the bottom. It’s still C sus. The symbol of suspension, by the way, is SUS.

In classical music, a suspension doesn’t have to be the fourth. It usually is, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be any note that has a hangover from the last chord. In other words, it’s leftover from the last chord. Look at that example.

We have an F chord, then we have a C seventh chord, don’t we? (Duane Playing Piano) Now, what does a chord change to after C seventh? It goes to F, but what’s that B Flat doing in it? (Duane Playing Piano) That B Flat is the fourth of the F chord, I mean fourth of the F scale, and it resolves to the third, so that’s a classic suspension. (Duane Playing Piano) That’s a SUS. right there.

The first non-harmonic tone, we started on an F chord, and that A in the tenor part moved to B Flat, that’s called an anticipation because it’s anticipating the arrival of the C seventh chord. B Flat does not belong to the F chord. It belongs to the C seventh chord, so it’s anticipating the C seventh chord. (Duane Playing Piano) Okay? Now, that anticipation then becomes a suspension. Anticipations often become a suspension. They are anxious to get to the next chord, but once they get to the next chord, they like it so much that they stay too long and they get a hangover, then they have to be resolved the next morning. (Laughs)

All right, so that’s all there is to suspensions. It’s real simple. You’ve replaced the third with the fourth. That’s a little more Good Stuff You Really Ought to Know.

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Wikipedia article on suspensions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_(music)#Suspension