Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of "musical meaning", which conceptualizes the way a musical work is given in terms of its formal and meaningful features. The relevance of studying this issue is determined by the importance that the original version of the composition created by the composer has for further development of the musical fabric – both on the part of the performer and the audience of listeners. The purpose of the study is to determine approaches to the specifics of the existence of music, which is not directly reduced to sound and at the same time is realized in sound. Accordingly, the objectives of the study included 1) to identify and compare the most significant definitions of musical meaning, to establish the place of intonation in its physical, aesthetic and spiritual-intellectual disclosure; 2) to describe the means of expression that contribute to the achievement of technical and directly artistic goals; 3) to substantiate the nature of the connection of intonation with general musical and extra-musical phenomena. The research methodology is based on the philosophical theory of music as a temporary art. Categorical analysis was used in combination with elements of the biographical method and the method of included observation. The methods of private disciplines such as musicology, musical psychology, and communication theory are also used. The study shows the paradoxical nature of musical meaning, which is both set and at the same time elusive, requires strict restrictions – and at the same time organizes musical material through creatively free activity. The novelty of the work consists in clarifying the range of philosophical approaches to the "elusive" concept of musical meaning, in an attempt to find invariants of various interpretations of this concept based on a comprehensive analysis of the existence of musical meaning combining physical, emotional and spiritual-intellectual processes. The results obtained allow us to substantiate the specifics of performing skills, which includes not only the depth of understanding of the author's idea, but also the ability to find acceptable limits of variability of interpretations based on "semantic constants" captured by the creator of the work and recorded in his text in the form of notes. The communicative conditions of place and time also play a role, concentrating the national peculiarities of reading the musical meaning.