A couple more from Milan Kundera's The Incredible Lightness of Being:

Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life......Without realising it, the individual composes his life according o the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

and....

She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.

On the other hand.....

Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcyles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.