Deaths
- January 10 – Annette Mills, partner of "Muffin the Mule", 60
- February 14 – Charles Cuvillier, composer of operettas, 77
- March 12 – Charlie Parker, jazz saxophonist, 34 (lobar pneumonia, bleeding ulcer and cirrhosis of liver)
- April 10 – Oskar Lindberg, composer, 67
- April 12 – W. H. Anderson, composer, 72
- May 4 – George Enescu, composer, 73
- May 15 – Oskar Adler, violinist and music critic, 79
- May 17 – Francesco Balilla Pratella, composer and musicologist, 75
- June 11 – Marcel Samuel-Rousseau, organist, composer and opera producer, 72
- June 19 – Willy Burkhard, composer, 55
- June 28 - Göta Ljungberg, Wagnerian soprano, 56
- July 4 - Ruth Vincent, operatic soprano, 78
- July 7 – Franco Casavola, Futurist composer, 63
- July 25 – Isaak Dunayevsky, conductor and composer, 55
- August 5 – Carmen Miranda, singer and dancer, 46 (heart attack)
- August 13 - Florence Easton, soprano, 72
- August 22 - Olin Downes, music critic, 69
- August 24 – Edgar Henrichsen, organist and composer, 76
- October 7 - Frieda Hempel, operatic soprano, 70
- October 14 – Harry Parr-Davies, composer and songwriter, 41 (perforated ulcer)
- October 20 – Adolf Mišek, double bassist and composer, 80
- October 27 - Bernardo de Muro, operatic tenor, 73
- November 11 – Jerry Ross, songwriter
- November 22 – Guy Ropartz, composer and conductor, 91
- November 27 – Arthur Honegger, composer, 63
- November 30 – Josip Štolcer-Slavenski, composer
- December 5 – Lucien Durosoir, violinist and composer, 67
- December 11 – Franz Syberg, composer, 51
- December 21 - Gladys Ripley, operatic contralto, 47
- date unknown
- Bessie Brown, blues singer
- Vernon Isley, original Isley brother, killed in an accident aged 13
Read more about this topic: 1955 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“This is the 184th Demonstration.
...
What we do is not beautiful
hurts no one makes no one desperate
we do not break the panes of safety glass
stretching between people on the street
and the deaths they hire.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)