Music perception is a multi-level system of creative activity carried out in a unity of emotional and rational, collective and individual, physical and spiritual, conscious and intuitive, linear and non-linear mechanisms and actions. When a person perceives music, he cognizes not only the content, but also himself, realizes personal potential. In the article practice-oriented strategies for immersion into the artistic world of musical works: intonational-plastic, intonational-genre, intonational-contemplative, intonational-stylistic were grounded and experimentally tested. Covering a wide area of music content, they can be added, improved are considered as the basic foundations of the education of music perception, on which students can rely in their lives. None of the stated approaches gave direct instructions on what specifically needs to be heard in a piece of music. The methods of unobtrusive targeting of attention to the disclosure of musical content, its projection on life experience (speech, physical, kinesthetic, somatic, plastic, gestural) were prevailed. Incomparable results of perception arise in situations of subject-visual or emotional-figurative disclosure of the content of music, retelling it by a teacher or establishing links with students’ intonation experience (prototypes of speech, bodily movements); while listening to music, or its active experience, suspended, immersed in the emotionally saturated world of musical images. Attempts to overcome the spiritual and physical level of perception, to approach the content of music, bypassing these processes, do not lead to any meaningful pedagogical results.