A suspension is a point of potential that is followed by a result that causes redefinition of what led up to the suspension and resolution. For example a series of tonic chords don’t demand reinterpretation, but put a dominant leading to the dominant with a suspension and now those repeated tonic chords take on new meaning. It’s where/how a suspension resolves that can reshape the past and setup expectations for the future – perhaps more than other musical devices.
A musical suspension is a stretch of sound—a note that lingers, that clings to the previous intention with the fragile grip of a spider’s thread. A suspension exists not as a question, but as the space where questions are born, where tension rises and falls but does not yet break – that’s the resolution. Suspense is a mandatory part of music and life. Even monotony or silence or non-action have their own suspense that will eventually resolve.
In music, the suspension is a tool of tension. A 4-3 suspension, or a 7-6—these are numbers that speak of dissonance and resolution, of sound that twists and shifts and finally lands. Or doesn’t. Because a suspension does not always “resolve” to anything expected. Sometimes it lingers, its edges fraying into silence or folding into a diminished chord that resolves nothing at all. And yet, whether it lands or lingers, whether it settles or disappears, the suspension gives meaning to what came before and to what follows after.
Life is full of suspensions. A breath caught before an answer. The quiet seconds after a question has been asked but before it has been met. The anticipation of footsteps approaching—a lover, or a stranger, or an answer in their hand. In these moments, we live fully, suspended not just in time but in the possibilities that time holds. These are the intervals where the world waits for itself to become something else. And we, like that note, are caught in the act of transformation many times unsure of where we will land.
What makes the suspension so powerful is not just the tension it holds but the way it resolves—or refuses to resolve. A major chord following a 4-3 feels inevitable, even comforting. It tells us that everything we worried over was unnecessary because the suspension resolved to a place of comfort. A minor resolution feels bittersweet, as though the tension was necessary but could not help leaving a shadow behind. A diminished or augmented (or any “unstable” chord) chord—sharp-edged, unresolved—takes the suspension and reframes it, leaving it neither here nor there. In music, this can be thrilling. In life, it can leave scars.
Suspensions have a way of rewriting themselves. If they resolve well—if the answer is kind, if the waiting was worth it—we look back on the tension as purposeful, even beautiful. The anxiety we felt is reframed as a necessary part of the journey. But if the resolution falters, if the answer is unkind, the suspension twists in memory. What was once anticipation becomes dread, confirmed and eternal.
But a suspension’s true power is in its impermanence. It is not meant to last, and it never does. Even unresolved suspensions—those that refuse to settle—fade in time. There are many pieces of music that begin and end with a kind of unease, perhaps not a traditional 4-3 suspension or anything but it is suspense. Think of Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima! This piece is pure unyielding suspense. But even a piece this infused with suspense must fall – the piece end. The music concludes and other sounds take its place. And so must we.
Not all suspensions are grand. Some flicker by unnoticed, like the dissonance in passing tones that resolve before we have time to feel them. Others stretch for measures, pulling the listener into their web, the weight of them almost unbearable. The same is true of life. The brief hesitations—a glance, a pause, a decision left hanging—pass without leaving a mark. But the long ones, the years spent waiting, searching, wondering—these are the suspensions that carve into us, that change the shape of who we are.
There is a symmetry in the suspension. It begins with tension, and it ends—sometimes quietly, sometimes abruptly—with release. But what comes in between is not a void. It is not silence. It is a fullness, a potential. To be suspended is to be stretched, to exist in a state of possibility, not yet one thing or another but both at once. This is why we remember them. This is why we hold them close.
Western music depends on the suspension, but not all traditions see it the same way. In Indian classical music, tension grows not from dissonance but from cycles—melodic and rhythmic—turning over and over, each return to the tonic a kind of resolution. Javanese gamelan stretches time itself, the resolution found not in chords but in layers of sound dissolving into one another. What feels fraught to one listener might pass unnoticed to another, just as what feels urgent in one life might barely register in another.
The performer holds the suspension. They shape its tension, its weight, its promise. A violinist must stretch the bow just so, neither too much nor too little, for the note to hold its fragile dissonance. A pianist must feel the keys without crushing them, letting the sound ring and resolve. A life suspended is much the same. We hold what we cannot control. We shape what we cannot see. We trust that what comes next will give meaning to what is now.
Yet even resolutions are temporary. A suspension resolves into a chord that resolves into another chord, and on it goes. The music moves. The questions change. Stability is not the end but a way station, a pause in the motion, and then the motion begins again. This is the nature of life: to be suspended, to resolve, to be suspended once more.
The beauty of the suspension lies not in its tension, not in its resolution, but in its existence. It is the moment when the music, life, holds its breath, the moment when possibility blooms. It is not a pause, and it is not an end. It is what carries us forward and comments on the past.
Suspension is the stretch. Suspension is the weight. Suspension is the thread that holds, for a moment, all that might be. And when it lets go, when it resolves or dissolves or disappears, it does not leave us empty. It leaves us with a living life and living music.
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