A museme is a minimal unit of music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

al meaning, analogous to a morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

 in linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, "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. (Tagg 1979, p.71)

The term was brought to popularity by Philip Tagg, derived from the work of Charles Seeger

Charles Seeger

Charles Seeger, Jr. was a noted musicologist, composer, and teacher. He was the father of iconic American folk singer Pete Seeger .-Life:...

 (Middleton 1990, p.189).

Musematic repetition ("repetition of musemes" (ibid, p.269)) is simple repetition

Repetition (music)

Repetition is important in music, where sounds or sequences are often repeated. One often stated idea is that repetition should be in balance with the initial statements and variations in a piece. It may be called restatement, such as the restatement of a theme...

 "at the level of the short figure, often used to generate an entire structural framework." (ibid, p.189) and contrasted with discursive repetition, in which the repetition is not so precise.

See also: musical analysis

Musical analysis

Musical analysis is the attempt to answer the question how does this music work?. The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst, and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Ian Bent , analysis is "an...

.

Source

• Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
• Tagg (1979). Cited in Middleton (2002).