A museme is a minimal unit of
music
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...
al meaning, analogous to a
morpheme
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...
in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, "the basic unit of musical expression which in the framework of one given musical system is not further divisible without destruction of meaning." A museme may:
:be broken down into component parts which are not in themselves meaningful within the framework of the musical language...but are nevertheless basic elements (not units) of musical expression which, when altered, may be compared to the phonemes of speech in that they alter the museme (morpheme) of which they are part and may thereby also alter its meaning.
[
The term was brought to popularity by ]Philip Tagg
Philip Tagg (22 February 1944 – 9 May 2024) was a British musicologist, writer and educator. He was co-founder of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and author of several influential books on popular music and ...
,[ derived from the work of ]Charles Seeger
Charles Louis Seeger Jr. (December 14, 1886 – February 7, 1979) was an American musicologist, composer, teacher, and folklorist. He was the husband of the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, father of the American folk singers Pete Seeger (1919– ...
.[
Musematic repetition ("repetition of musemes"][) is simple ]repetition
Repetition may refer to:
*Repetition (rhetorical device), repeating a word within a short space of words
*Repetition (bodybuilding), a single cycle of lifting and lowering a weight in strength training
*Working title for the 1985 slasher film '' ...
"at the level of the short figure, often used to generate an entire structural framework."[ and contrasted with discursive repetition, in which the repetition is not so precise.
]
See also
*Musical analysis
Musical analysis is the study of musical structure in either compositions or performances. According to music theorist Ian Bent, music analysis "is the means of answering directly the question 'How does it work?'". The method employed to ans ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Museme
Musical terminology