Musicologist and teacher.
She was born into an intellectual family: her father, S. G. Solopov, was an engineer who later became a Doctor of Technical Sciences, and her mother, G. L. Solopova, was an architect. She began studying music in childhood, first with K. N. Dmitrevskaya (general training) and then with the distinguished teacher E. B. Gekker (piano).
At the seven‑year music school on the famous Sobachya Ploshchadka (later the Gnesin Moscow Special School of Music), N. S. Gulyanitskaya was admitted by Elena Fabianovna Gnesina. She received a recommendation to continue her musical education and devote her life to music from Professor S. S. Skrebkov. From 1946 to 1948 she studied at the Gnesin State Music School, and from 1948 to 1953 at the Gnesin State Music and Pedagogical Institute (now the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music), simultaneously in two faculties: the Faculty of History, Theory, and Composition (her diploma supervisor was V. O. Berkova) and the Piano Faculty (class of Professor V. Yu. Tilicheyev, a student of H. G. Neuhaus).
From 1953 to 1963 she taught theoretical subjects at the Gnesin Moscow Special School of Music and, in her later years there, also at the Faculty of History, Theory, and Composition of the Gnesin State Music and Pedagogical Institute (now the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music). She began working at the Institute under Rector V. Muromtsev. She completed a one‑year postgraduate programme for Institute teachers, and in 1977 she defended her Candidate of Art Studies dissertation at the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatoire (supervisor: Professor Yu. N. Tyulin).
In 1988 she defended her Doctoral dissertation, dedicated to the memory of Yu. N. Tyulin. Having worked continuously at the Gnesin State Music and Pedagogical Institute – Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, N. S. Gulyanitskaya progressed from lecturer to Professor and Head of Department. Her teaching continues to focus on historical and theoretical disciplines, which, in close contact with the humanities, form a broad field of scholarly and pedagogical interest. From 1993 to 2012 N. S. Gulyanitskaya served as Chair of the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music Dissertation Council.
Among her scholarly works, in addition to numerous articles, the following monographs may be noted:
- N. S. Gulyanitskaya, Poetics of Musical Composition: Theoretical Aspects of Russian Sacred Music of the Twentieth Century, Moscow, Yazyki slavyanskoy kultury, 2002;
- N. S. Gulyanitskaya, Russian Music: The Formation of the Tonal System, Eleventh to Twentieth Centuries, Moscow, Progress‑Tradition, 2005;
- N. S. Gulyanitskaya, Methods of the Science of Music, Moscow, Muzyka, 2009, and others.
