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A combination of pitches that sounds unstable and calls for resolution.
Dissonance is your source of motion: it creates the pull that consonance releases. Decide how each dissonance is approached and left — prepared and resolved down by step as a suspension, passing between consonances on a weak beat, or struck on the beat as an appoggiatura — because the treatment shapes how it sounds as much as the interval does. Which intervals count as dissonant has shifted over the centuries; in common-practice writing the seventh, the second and the fourth above the bass are the classic cases.
Dissonance is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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