This paper discusses the problem of musical meaning from the perspective of some
twentieth-century approaches to linguistic semantics. The text briefly covers the issue as it
was viewed in the first half of the previous century, and then reviews some studies of musical
meaning within the structural, generative, and cognitive frameworks. The author's opinion is
that conceptual metaphor theory, in its search for the conceptualization of music, provides
the most solid ground for the foundation of a true'musico-semantics'.

This paper discusses the problem of musical meaning from the perspective of some
twentieth-century approaches to linguistic semantics. The text briefly covers the issue as it
was viewed in the first half of the previous century, and then reviews some studies of musical
meaning within the structural, generative, and cognitive frameworks. The author's opinion is
that conceptual metaphor theory, in its search for the conceptualization of music, provides
the most solid ground for the foundation of a true 'musico-semantics'.