Glossary

A non-essential dissonance Dissonances are called non-essential because they don’t determine the identity of the chord, as they don’t change the type of the chord. For more information see my essay on essential dissonances, in which I also elaborate on the difference between non-essential and essential dissonances.

The German theorist and composer Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721–1783) was the first musician to make a distinction between two specific types of dissonances, between what he has called essential dissonances (wesentliche Dißonanzen) and non-essential —or incidental— dissonances (zufällige Dißonanzen). According to him, an essential dissonance comes in only one form: a chordal seventh that “does

In this essay, I will deal with the non-chord note labelled a suspension. A suspension is an on-beat dissonance —i.e. a metrically strong note that doesn’t belong to the regular chord. It is prepared by a consonance of a different chord —the usual procedure— or by a dissonance of a different chord—less common— and usually

Usually, a chromatic alteration of a note follows the other version of that note in the same part. Such a chromatic step is also called a passus duriusculus. However, when a chromatic alteration of a note follows the other version of that note in another part, this is usually considered to be erroneous, an error

A passus duriusculus is a chromatic step or a chromatic passage. It seems that Christoph Bernhard (1628–1692) —a German pupil of Heinrich Schütz, singer, composer, kapellmeister and author of three handwritten treatises on composition— was the first and only author to use the term passus duriusculus. (So, it doesn’t stem from rhetoric but is meant