# 3.3 Categories of dissonance in tonal music

In tonal music, dissonances only occur in specific, controlled contexts. These hold true not just for Mozart but for virtually all western music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This enables us to establish some rules for how dissonances are treated, which fall into three basic categories: passing notes, neighbour notes and suspensions. Let's look at each of these in turn.

OpenLearn - Voice-leading analysis of music 1: the foreground
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