Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the communicative processes that encompass the creation, interpretation, perception, and evaluation of the various phenomena constituting musical art. The numerous internal and external communicative links in the spheres of the composer, the performer, the listener and the musicologist-critic – links which constitute a complex system of the transmission of musical information – are considered from a socio-cultural perspective, which determines the high social role of the academic genres of music. The book will be of use to professional musicians and to all those interested in the acute problems of musicology, musical aesthetics, the sociology of music, and musical pedagogics.