the paper presents the results of an experiment with verbal associations. Commonly known musical terms were used as verbal stimuli. The informants belonged to two groups: students of music and students of philology. The responses reflect the basics of professional musical knowledge and the laymen’s background knowledge of music. The responses include: characteristics, hyperonymic terms, terms of similarity, frequent accompanying terms, evaluative words, personal names, music titles. Musical discourse, as the majority of other genres of discourse, exists in tree forms i. e. professional, laymen’s and mixed types. The experiment shows the ifference between professionals and laymen. Another observation is deterioration of professional musical language among the younger generation.