From his precocious early years at the cutting edge of the musical avant garde to those many and memorable nights where just the man and the piano and that engaging gravelly voice of his would wrap around an American songbook standard or a 32-something he’d made earlier, Richard Rodney Bennett really did, in the words of his publisher, do “everything in-between” when it came to the art he knew and loved from the inside out.

The astronomer Sir Patrick Moore was a keen composer of decided musical preferences, and no mean xylophonist. The news of his death on Sunday reminded me of my hugely enjoyable encounter with him - for musical reasons - for the Daily Telegraph in October 1998, heralding the release of a recording of his tunes.

It was the Seventies/Eighties supersoap Dallas which made Larry Hagman a household name, and his portrayal of the amoral, unscrupulous oil baron JR Ewing became a benchmark character in TV history. Hagman's performance also helped to make Dallas one of the highest-rated shows of all time, and the question "Who shot JR?" (which somebody did at the end of series three) became the focus of intense global speculation.

William Turnbull was a Dundee shipyard engineer’s son who became a highly respected fixture on the London art scene for over six decades, principally as a sculptor, but also as painter and printmaker. While he never quite became a household name, Turnbull had a reputation as an artist’s artist who worked in highly diverse idioms – from a classically slanted primitivism to the fringes of pop and minimalism – bringing to bear an approach that was distinctively cool, some might argue a touch dry.

It’s hard to imagine that a composer’s death at the age of 103 could be a loss to music, in the sense of possible future work, as well as a personal loss, which of course death will always be. But Elliott Carter was a unique exception. Not only was he still writing music up to a few weeks before his death on 5 November, but the dozen or so works he had completed since his 100th birthday showed none of the negative traces of old age one would normally expect to find in the music of somebody even four-fifths his age.

The death of lyricist Hal David at 91 is a sad reminder that the golden age of a uniquely American approach to songwriting is getting further and further away. The Bacharach and David brand will last, as will classic songs like “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Don’t Make Me Over”, “Magic Moments”, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head, “The Look of Love” and “Walk On By”. Yet David’s passing emphasises that although these compositions have a life of their own, they remain rooted in an era that becomes less and less tangible as the years pass.

Marvin Hamlisch’s three Oscars all came in 1974. "I think now we can talk to each other as friends," he said as he accepted his third award of the night. He composed the winning song "The Way We Were" (and the film's score) for Barbara Streisand, having started out on Broadway as rehearsal pianist in Funny Girl. A wizened sage warned Hamlisch that it didn't do to win so much so young, but he paid no notice and a year later went and wrote the music for A Chorus Line, his Broadway debut.

True originals are those who keep contemporary arts bright, and one of the handful of dance performers who set the 1980s and 90s on fire was a bony, white-skinned, bleakly witty and garrulous physical clown with a taste for the extreme called Nigel Charnock. The news of his death last night from cancer at the age of only 52 feels painful to anyone who suffered and laughed so much at some of his merciless works.

Before last December’s O2 Deep Purple gig, I heard one denim-clad middle-aged man arguing to another that the absence of guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was irrelevant. Rather, without keyboardist Jon Lord, this was Purple in name only. Moreover the band had brought an orchestra along. What a cheek, given that Deep Purple’s iconic Concerto for Group and Orchestra had been 100 per cent Lord’s baby.

“One never consciously observes. The only people who consciously observe are policemen and undercover agents.” Eric Sykes, who has died at the age of 89, was the last of the great vaudevilleans. When I met him in the late 1990s, he was already totally deaf and largely blind, and somehow continued to work and remain remarkably chipper with it. He had his first ear operation in 1952, another a decade later, whereafter he wore a hearing aid camouflaged as a pair of thick-rimmed glasses.