Roman Numeral Treatment of Suspensions

Question

My question today stems from me having difficulty assigning a roman numeral to a chord which either has a suspension (please see below)

Or when there is melodic motion in the bass (please see below)

In the first case (both examples in C major by the way), do we simply call this a vi chord and call it a day? Or, because the D in the soprano line is sounded, is this a viadd4 chord? Similarly, in the example with the C-D motion in the bass, is this just a I chord? Or is this a one chord that becomes something else--something that I wouldn't even know how to name?

Answer 1

Actually, without seeing the preceding measure, there are quite a couple of things that might be going on in your first example (as @replete noted in the comments).

• D is a non-chord tone and it could be a suspension, if the note D was played on the same voice on the previous measure and help for this one; you could call the chord a 'vi ^4-3', because it's the 4th of the root that is the suspension and is resolved to the chord note, the third (in this case C).

• It could be a passing tone on an accented beat, if the previous tone on the preceding measure was an E.

• It could be an appoggiatura, which is a non-chord neighbor tone that is resolved stepwise.

On your second example, the D note is simply a passing tone, which isn't notated in some way. It's not on a strong beat of the measure, so unless something else is happening on the other voices as well, there is no need to change something in your analysis. This kind of passing tone is usually used when the voice is moving stepwise, so in your example, the next note will most likely be E.