Does music have meanings? If so, what are they like? These questions concern the semiotics of music. I will address these questions, using evidence from what I call aesthetic protocol analysis. I will further ask about the rhetorical significance of music having the kind of semiotics it apparently has. Given that music has the meanings it does, in the way it does, then what is the aesthetic function of that? In my view, asking what role meanings in music play for its aesthetic effect is to ask a rhetorician’s question. Rhetoricians will want to know what sorts of things artifacts do, and how they do them. That also goes for artifacts whose function is to provide aesthetic experience—and that, I believe, is what many of us listen to music for most of the time. So I wish to say something about what role the experience of musical meanings plays in this.