Deaths
- January 12 - Chellapilla Satyam, Indian film music director, 65
- January 20 – Beatrice Lillie, Canadian actress and singer, 94
- February 5 – Joe Raposo, composer and lyricist, Bein' Green, 51 (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma)
- February 6 – King Tubby Jamaican DJ and composer, father of dub reggae, 58 (gunshot wounds)
- February 14 – Vincent Crane (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown), 45 (drug overdose)
- February 23 – Florencio Morales Ramos, singer and composer, 72
- March 19 – Alan Civil, horn player, 59
- March 20 – Archie Bleyer, US arranger and bandleader, 79
- April 8 - A. M. Rajah, Indian playback singer and composer, 59 (rail accident)
- April 26 – Lucille Ball, US actress and singer, 77
- May 10 – Woody Shaw, jazz musician, 44 (kidney failure)
- May 15 – Johnny Green, composer, conductor and arranger, 80
- May 30 – Zinka Milanov, operatic soprano, 83
- June 14 – Pete de Freitas, drummer with Echo & the Bunnymen, 27 (motorcycle accident)
- June 22 – Henri Sauguet, composer, 88
- June 24 – Hibari Misora, Japanese enka singer, 52 (hepatitis)
- July 5 – Ernesto Halffter, Spanish composer and conductor, 84
- July 16 – Herbert von Karajan, conductor, 81
- July 21 - Mushtaq Ali Khan, Indian sitar, surbahar and pakhawaj player, 78
- August 1 – John Ogdon, pianist, 52 (diabetes-related)
- August 2 – Luiz Gonzaga, Brazilian musician, 76
- August 21 – Raul Seixas, singer and songwriter, 44 (diabetes-related)
- August 25 – Gunnar Berg, Danish composer
- September 14 – Perez Prado, Cuban bandleader and composer, 72
- September 7 – Mikhail Goldstein, violinist and composer, 71
- September 15 – Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano, 56 (leukemia)
- September 22 – Irving Berlin, composer, lyricist, 101
- September 24 – Jean Perrin, pianist and composer, 79
- September 30 – Virgil Thomson, composer, 92
- October 17 – Morteza Hannaneh, composer, 66
- October 19 – Alan Murphy, guitarist, member of Level 42 and Go West, 35 (AIDS-related)
- October 22 – Ewan MacColl, folk singer, 74
- October 31 – Conrad Beck, Swiss composer, 88
- November 5 – Vladimir Horowitz, pianist, 86
- November 15 – Alejo Durán, composer of vallenatos, 80
- December – Billy Lyall, keyboardist of Pilot and Bay City Rollers, 46 (AIDS-related)
- December 6 – Sammy Fain, US composer, 87
- December 21 – Ján Cikker, Slovak composer, 78
- December 26 – Sir Lennox Berkeley, composer, 86
Read more about this topic: 1989 In Music
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“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)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)