On the basis of the study of scientific-pedagogical literature, it has been established that one of the most important tasks of the music teacher is to explain the content of musical works and works of other art genres. It was found out that the basis of objective judgments about the content of artistic works is the understanding of sign-symbolic art language. The music teacher's skill of the semiotic interpretation of art has been defined as the complex professional quality of a teacher's personality, which includes: practical knowledge of artistic signs (their forms, meanings, system properties and pragmatics) used in music and other forms of art; the ability to reflexive perception of artistic form; possession of verbal language. The methodic of forming the skill of art-semiotic interpretation is the multifaceted systemic influence on the revealed components of this professional quality. Such an influence in relation to the whole complex of the methodology is provided by culturological, poly-artistic, comparative-analytical and action approaches. The methodical principles are established, namely: visibility, dialogue, praxeologic, tolerance. The developed technique should achieve the best results by conditions of providing emotional and perceptual brightness and genre-style representation of artistic examples; use of interactive forms of work with students; the adjusted intensity of the regular speech practice of students. A complex of methods of students for mastering of semiotic skills is developed. Methods are divided into two groups: a) those that form the ability to detect and perceive-understanding the signs and the text of the art work; b) those aimed at the ability to communicate in words the meaning of the works. The first group includes methods: semiotic analysis of artistic text, experiment with perception, explication of semantic invariant text, comparative semiotic evaluation, training of attention to sign content, textbooks, provocative tests, inventing of symbols, systematization of semantic variants of artistic sign. The second group of methods include: exercises on finding a suitable rhetorical figures; method of rapid oral questioning (oral quiz); the creation of a reference mark and a notebook (by V. Shatalov), a semiotic map (according to T. Buzen), didactic games. On the basis of the constructed theoretical model, a complex of pedagogical diagnostics of the semiotic interpretation skill was created. The criteria are defined: perceptual, which allows to establish the degree of stability of the artistic-psychological installation on the sign perception of the artistic form, as well as the acuity of attention to the sign form; b) empirical knowledge of grammar and syntactic norms of musical language and languages of other types of art; c) creative, which makes it possible to assess the level of development of imagination and other creative abilities of future music teachers; d) a speech that assesses the ability of the future music teacher to find the necessary verbal and nonverbal means for expressing the sign content of the perceived artistic form in the living communication process. The method of diagnostics has been successfully tested during the qualifying experiment.
