The article concerns with two notions connected with music in fiction. It is a system of signs, for example, musical titles, images, notions. Some scholars interpret it as a system of acoustic signs in literary texts, for example, natural sounds, harmony of nature and so on. The notion of ʻmusical ekphrasisʼ is now forming in Russian literary criticism. It derives from definition of rhetoric device and means of verbal description of music, including performance of musical compositions. The article presents different interpretations of the notion by contemporary scholars and analyses some problems of definition. There are compared ʻmusical ekphrasisʼ and ʻverbal musicʼ.