The article considers historical and cultural parallels and differences in the development of music and plastic arts (painting, sculpture, graphics). It is argued that the comparison of natural means of artistic assimilation of reality peculiar to these arts, those are acoustic and optical means, respectively — is of no less importance for the artistic comparison of music and plastics. The author shows that the acoustic nature of musical sounds, in particular, their ordered overtone structure (as a manifestation of the fundamental properties of symmetry), caused their semiotic ordering. The socalled gamut serves as a sort of artificial “alphabetic” language of music, which is not the case with the “color gamut” of painting. The genesis of music and plastic arts is considered in detail. For music, the common genesis of its melodic component and speech intonation is identified. A principal feature of musical creativity and musical perception is highlighted: in music the object of the artistic image is not real, but virtual; while the very “image” is a kind of symbolic structure, induced by music in the mind of a person. Through the example of music, the perceptual and apperceptive stages of perception of works of art are separately considered: perception takes place when a person hears signs (musical sounds), apperception — when a person listens to symbols (music). It is at the stage of apperceptive perception of artistic symbols that the impact of an art on a person is invariant with respect to types of art, including music and plastics