Music as a socio-cultural phenomenon is of interest of modern science. In the course of development of knowledge about musical phenomena in aesthetics, cultural science, psychology, musicology and philosophy (in the framework of ontology and epistemology) the special role of music in life both of a specific person and a society as a whole was recognized, which has led to research the specifics of music and its language, identifying the functions performed by this type of art. The paper analyses the genesis of the language of music in the philosophy of music-specific information-communication system, which resides in the dynamics and forming the person's developed concept of being. In this work, music, its language is understood as symbol creation-the process of attributing of symbolic value to musical phenomena caused by the cultural-historical context. The language of music is a formation that combines music and non-music spheres, a distinctive feature of music as art is the reflection of reality in the form of images, influencing the perception and embodying of musical sounds (tones). Musical image is a kind of an artistic image, its peculiarity is playing the aesthetic qualities of the subjective and objective reality with the help of music sounds. The research is devoted to the musical system, which lies at the basis of the European tone-harmonic thinking. The specificity and functions of music in the process of representation are analysed. The central problem of the work is the identification of functions of the language of music as a special hierarchical system. The language of music is a special system of musical symbols (characters), formed in the process of historical development of musical art. The language of music is a complex hierarchical system, an element of which is a musical sound (tone). It is a constantly recurring system of signs, at levels of which there are systems of different signs, where any single sign is included in a certain sign system. Music is a special artificial language, managing a diverse system of different signs: from the simplest signals to the more complex symbolic systems and characters. Music is the product of cultural activities of the people, the subject of reflection which is the world (reality), world of human emotions, feelings, emotions, thought sphere, coded with a developed system of symbols (subjective reality). Music being a part of the culture penetrates into all spheres of human activity, its language is a universal means of fixation, storage and transfer of specific signals between different generations of people. The language of music is polyfunctional. Functions of the language of music as a special kind of a system are information-communicative, semiotic, aesthetic, nominative, representative, cognitive, socio-value, evaluation and regulatory-educational, etc. Among the functions of the language of music one can highlight main and derivative ones. The basic (the General) function of the language of music is informationcommunicative.
