Grigory Golovinsky was a Soviet and Russian musicologist and composer. He was born in Zhytomyr on February 18, 1923, and died in Moscow on September 20, 2002.
He graduated from the theoretical and composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory in 1951 and then completed postgraduate study there under Viktor Zuckerman. From 1945 he taught music literature at a music school. He taught analysis at the Central Music School from 1955 to 1958 and theoretical subjects at the Ippolitov-Ivanov Music School from 1955 to 1960 and again from 1964 to 1971. From 1957 to 1967, he was deputy chair of the music criticism commission of the Union of Soviet Composers. In 1967 he joined the Institute of Art Studies as a research fellow.
Golovinsky earned a Candidate of Art Studies degree in 1968 with a dissertation on Alexander Borodin’s chamber instrumental works. In 1985 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Art Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. His books on Borodin include Prince Igor by A. Borodin and Borodin’s Chamber Ensembles. He also published two books on rondo form: Rondo and Strophic Form, Variation Form, and Rondo Form.
He wrote articles on the music of Borodin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Rodion Shchedrin, among other named subjects. Later, he studied the sociology of music and the folkloric roots of musical creativity. His publications in this area include Composer and Folklore: From the Experience of Masters of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the monograph Mussorgsky and Folklore. He edited the collection M. P. Mussorgsky and Twentieth-Century Music. His book Articles. Memoirs appeared posthumously in 2005.
In 1965, Golovinsky was one of the founders of the Moscow Youth Music Club at the House of Composers. He was buried at Nikolo-Arkhangelsk Cemetery.