Neighbouring Tone More Than A Step Away?

Hello everyone

I'm reading "The Craft of Musical composition" by Paul Hindermith and he says that in most cases a neighbouring tone is a step above or below the chord tone, but it may be further away.

Is this common practice? In strict classical harmony is the neighbouring tone sometimes further than a step away? Or is this one of those things where it's more unique to the style of the text book author rather than what is more standard harmony practice?

Thanks for your time

No examples provided? I have not read that book, but I own Hindemith's treatise on traditional harmony. There is a chapter on non-chord tones and he defines neighboring tones as an unprepared suspension one second above (more common) or below (rarer) a chord tone, which then resolves stepwise to the chord tone, as a regular suspension would do. So I guess distances larger than a step would be for non-classical harmony. Perhaps "larger than a step" means an augmented second. I would imagine those would happen when using scales containing augmented seconds and one does not want to use notes outside that scale.  :dunno:

Possibly he means in case of modal mixture, or alternatively, tones that are one step away in a certain scale, but are more than two semitones distant (like an augmented second, etc.)

Is there anything in the way he defines their function that might shed some light on what he meant?  I could see the augmented second being included in his idea of a definition without too much fuss.  This is Hindemith we are talking about, after all:  raises hairs on the back of your neck, soothes them down again, raises hairs on the back of your neck, soothes them down... His music is like someone repeatedly dropping ice cubes down your back on a hot day, if that makes sense to anyone other than me.  

I think just about any augmented 2nd you will hear in a "common practice" melody will technically be a "step," too, since it is still the interval between 2 adjacent scale degrees.

But anyway, in strict, traditional counterpoint, all dissonances (neighbour tones included) are approached and/or resolved by step (at least I think they are--can anyone think of an example to disprove this?) From what I understand, The Craft of Musical Composition is Hindemith's attempt to create a new system of "rules" governing harmony for the 20th century (or at least to justify his own compositional eccentricities)--and I'm guessing this is the kind of music he is talking about in the passage you referred to. In music after 1900, you will hear plenty of notes more than a step away from the melodic chord tone that still function, rhythmically and structurally, as neighbour tones. Just don't do that in your 18th-Century counterpoint homework :musicwhistle:

It seems to me that commonly most notes that depart and return to the same chord tone that are more than a second away are chordal skips and not neighboring tones, unless that tone is dissonant which is not commonly done before extended and post tonality, or at least not that I'm aware of. When you get to extended and post tonality, though, just about anything goes so rules and labels (like neighboring tone) are a bit superfluous if you ask me.