Nikolay Sergeyevich Zhilyayev was a Russian musicologist, and the teacher of several 20th-century Russian composers. He was a pupil of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Sergei Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory in around 1904. He went on to teach there himself. His pupils included the composers Yevgeny Golubev, Aram Khachaturian, Alexei Vladimirovich Stanchinsky, Anatoly Nikolayevich Alexandrov and Samuil Evgenyevich Feinberg. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Art-Sciences and of the State Institute of Musical Science. He wrote many essays.