  This article discusses the extension of the notion of context from
linguistics to the domain of music. In language, the statistical regularity
known as Zipf's law -which concerns the frequency of usage of different words-
has been quantitatively related to the process of text generation. This
connection is established by Simon's model, on the basis of a few assumptions
regarding the accompanying creation of context. Here, it is shown that the
statistics of note usage in musical compositions are compatible with the
predictions of Simon's model. This result, which gives objective support to the
conceptual likeness of context in language and music, is obtained through
automatic analysis of the digital versions of several compositions. As a
by-product, a quantitative measure of context definiteness is introduced and
used to compare tonal and atonal works.
