Zivar Makhmudovna Guseynova

Zivar Makhmudovna Guseynova was born in Ashgabat on 25 February 1951 and is a Russian musicologist who studies the early sacred choral music of Rusʼ.

She trained and taught at the Leningrad Conservatory, where she was a lecturer and where her research on medieval Russian musicology took shape. She graduated in 1975 from the faculty of theory and composition at that conservatory and undertook postgraduate study there between 1975 and 1978. Her teachers included M. K. Mikhaylov and M. V. Brazhnikov, regarded as the founder of modern medieval musicology in Russia. She began teaching at the conservatory in 1979. In 1982 she was awarded the title of Kandidat for a dissertation on the systematisation of musical texts of early Rus', focusing on znamenny notation of the 11th to 14th centuries. In 1995 she defended her doctoral thesis on Aleksandr Mezenets's Izveshcheniye and music theory of the 17th century, and in 1998 she was appointed professor at the conservatory.

Her research covers the history and theory of early Russian choral singing, the scholarly description of notated manuscripts and the study of the literary texts of Russian musical works. She also teaches the history and theory of this choral music and modern Russian music. Her publications include studies of znamenny notation, the repertoire of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, the evangelical stikhira genre and the theory of znamenny chant in Mezenets's work, as well as musical transcriptions included in the collection One Thousand Years of Russian Church Music.

Her legacy lies in applying philological and palaeographic rigour to the study of Russian sacred music before the 18th century. Her work on manuscript description and the theory of znamenny chant is a point of reference for those working with these sources, which are considered difficult to read without a specific method.