  We use the high statistics E-772 data on the nuclear dependence of the
production of quarkonia $(J/\psi$ and $\Upsilon)$ and dimuons at large
transverse momentum $(p_T)$ in $p$-$A$ collisions to get information about the
gluonic EMC effect. We find a satisfactory quantitative agreement of the
theoretical predictions with the data although none of the models of the EMC
effect we consider could account for the entire data. Since all the qualitative
features are understood none the less in terms of perturbative QCD with nuclear
dependent parton densities, our results suggest that these data can now be used
for a better determination of the nuclear parton densities. Our conslusions are
shown to be insensitive to the hadronisation mechanism for the quarkonia.
