The neighbor tone

A voice may step off a consonance to the tone above or below and return, sounding the dissonance on the weak beat: the neighbor tone. Unlike the passing tone it goes nowhere — it decorates a standing tone rather than connecting two different ones — and the strict style therefore admits it more warily, preferring the lower neighbor and keeping the figure off the strong beat.

The neighbor tone decorates a tone going nowhere: wherever a line would otherwise repeat a pitch, stepping off and returning turns the standstill into a small gesture without pulling the line anywhere new. Third species relies on it to keep a florid line active between passing motions, and the tradition leans on the lower neighbor more heavily, treating the upper as the more delicate of the two. Reserved for moments the passing tone cannot reach, it reads as ornament rather than argument — the strict style’s more cautious role for it.

• Placing the neighbor tone on the strong beat, which gives an ornamental dissonance the accent that only a suspension has earned.
• Leaning on the upper neighbor as freely as the lower, when the tradition treats the upper as the more delicate of the two and reserves it for sparer use.
• Leaping away from the neighbor tone instead of stepping back to the tone it decorates, which abandons the return the whole device depends on.
• Approaching the neighbor tone by leap rather than by step, breaking the same stepwise discipline the passing tone observes.
• Reaching for a neighbor tone between two different chord tones, where nothing is actually held still — that is a passing tone’s job, not the neighbor’s.

• Johann Joseph Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), Liber secundus, third species — The quarter-note species admits the returning figure alongside the pass.
• Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Gründliche Anweisung zur Composition (1790), The counterpoint chapters, third species — The Classical-era species course transmits the same figure and the same cautions.