Musical Mereology

ABSTRACT I develop an axiomatic system of mereology that accounts for the ways in which musical works can be said to have parts. I distinguish two fundamental modes of composition that musical works exhibit: successive composition, whereby sound events are concatenated in time, and simultaneous composition, whereby sound events occur at the same time. I define various relations of parthood in terms of these operations and study the general principles governing them. I prove that they share some basic properties with the relation of parthood of classical mereology but depart from classical mereology in important respects concerning decomposition and composition principles.