The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry.  

The great folk guitarist Bert Jansch died early this morning, aged 67. Whether as a prime mover in London's 1960s folk scene, or as part of pioneering folk-jazzers Pentangle, or as a songwriter and solo artist, his influence on everyone from Paul Simon, Donovan, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young to, later, Johnny Marr, Graham Coxon and Beth Orton is simply immeasurable. Young compared Jansch's impact on the possibilities of the acoustic guitar as comparable to that of Jimi Hendrix's on the electric.

Few comedy writers can claim to have extracted so much mirth from the slightly foxed fabric of British life as David Croft, who (with his writing partner Jimmy Perry) created It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and, above all, Dad's Army. Though the latter initially fell foul of BBC One's controller Paul Fox, who protested that "you cannot take the mickey out of Britain's finest hour", its ineffably absurd and eccentric portrait of the Home Guard in wartime Walmington-on-Sea proved irresistible to millions of viewers.

Hard on the heels of the death of Lucian Freud comes the departure of another British art great, an artist who was Freud’s exact contemporary but who seems to belong in a different aesthetic universe – Richard Hamilton. While he was the more influential of the two, by some distance, Hamilton was never a contender for that nonsensical soubriquet "Britain’s greatest living artist". His work was too challenging, too difficult to pin down and it never told Britain anything it wanted to hear about itself.

The Swiss-born Sicilian tenor has died, far too young at the age of 43, 10 days after an accident on his Vespa. He was one of the best and most stylish of his rare breed, even if the scrummage to find an heir to Pavarotti sometimes pushed him into a corner. I'll not forget his Alvaro in Verdi's La forza del Destino at Covent Garden: here after so long was another true Italian tenor with a golden middle range who could at least act with his voice.

News about the death of Colombia's greatest salsa singer, Joe Arroyo, has sent shock waves through the salsa world and fan bases internationally, and it brought in streams of digital messages. On the morning of his death two weeks ago, the President Juan Manuel Santos tweeted, “It’s a great loss for music and Colombia.” Arroyo’s life resembled a soap opera, and the irony is that a series based on his life story, El Joe, le Leyenda, (Joe, the Legend), has been the most popular soap on primetime Colombian television since May. It remains on air in tribute.

Amy Winehouse is being buried today. This article about her life and talent was written by regular theartsdesk contributor Paul McGee a few weeks before she died but tragically holds true now more than ever:

The capricious nature of modern pop stardom being what it is, there are some wrong turns that are harder to recover from than others. For instance, it was recently said of Duffy that she probably throws empty Diet Coke cans at the radio every time she hears a song by Adele (which I imagine would be fairly often). During the last few days, however, I've wondered whether or not Adele might have ever observed the career trajectory of Amy Winehouse and thought to herself, there but for the grace of God... After all, artistically speaking both women come from broadly similar backgrounds – north-London “blue-eyed soul” singer-songwriters with a performing arts school pedigree and a second album wildly more successful than its predecessor – but it's there that the similarities end.

Amy Winehouse is being buried today. This article about her life and talent was written by regular theartsdesk contributor Paul McGee a few weeks before she died but tragically holds true now more than ever:

The capricious nature of modern pop stardom being what it is, there are some wrong turns that are harder to recover from than others. For instance, it was recently said of Duffy that she probably throws empty Diet Coke cans at the radio every time she hears a song by Adele (which I imagine would be fairly often). During the last few days, however, I've wondered whether or not Adele might have ever observed the career trajectory of Amy Winehouse and thought to herself, there but for the grace of God... After all, artistically speaking both women come from broadly similar backgrounds – north-London “blue-eyed soul” singer-songwriters with a performing arts school pedigree and a second album wildly more successful than its predecessor – but it's there that the similarities end.

Amy Winehouse, who was found dead at her London home this afternoon, was the greatest female pop singer of her time, in the way that Billie Holiday was of hers, says Peter Culshaw, the first of theartsdesk's writers who tell below what she signified to music and to them. More tributes come from Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, David Nice and Matilda Battersby.

Lucian Freud, who died aged 88 at his west London home on Wednesday, was often described as Britain's greatest living artist. In the six decades he was active, figurative painting went in and out of fashion - though mostly it was out - but Freud remained resolutely outside and beyond fashion. As both an art world grandee and something of a celebrity, he really had no rival, though perhaps David Hockney, still alive and 15 years his junior, came closest. Freud, however, had a very different way of looking: cooler, harder, more penetrative. Below, four writers pay their personal tributes.

Roland Petit died this morning aged 87, a world choreographer of chic and erotic theatricality who blew away the French classical ideal in a roar of post-war sexual liberation. He created an all-male corps of swans for Swan Lake long before Matthew Bourne, and his roles for his exquisite wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, repositioned ballet drama upon the femme fatale rather than the virgin. Arguably, though, for British ballet-goers he was above all the seducer who almost lured Margot Fonteyn away to France (and who got her to have a nose job) just as she was leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to international glory. Had Fonteyn done so, the history of Britain’s ballet would have been different.