Upward-Resolving Suspensions and the 2-3 Suspension

A suspension always has three steps: preparation, suspension, resolution. The note is a consonant chord tone in one chord, held over while the bass or other voices change underneath it, so it becomes dissonant, then moves to resolve that dissonance. Most suspensions resolve downward by step, because the dissonance usually sits above the note it wants to settle into. An upward-resolving suspension, sometimes called a retardation, flips that: the held note is low in pitch relative to where it needs to land, so instead of falling into place it gets pushed up by step into the consonance. The ear hears this as a kind of delayed arrival that rises into resolution rather than sighing down into it, which gives the line a lifting, expectant quality instead of a relaxing one.

The 2-3 suspension is a common upward case. The suspended voice sits a second above another voice, clashes, then rises a step to land a third above it. A 7-8 suspension works the same way against a bass: the suspended tone sits a seventh above the bass, then rises a step to the octave once the bass settles on its chord tone. In G major, a 7-8 suspension over a tonic bass on G means the suspended note is F-sharp, held from the previous chord, clashing against the G bass, then stepping up to G, the octave above the root.

Because the suspended note is a frozen leftover from the chord before it, figured bass never lists it as part of the current chord's harmony. It only earns a place in the numbers once it resolves into an actual chord tone, which ties this topic to how figured bass and nonchord tones get labeled across the rest of embellishing tones in the unit.