Art is not effective when we control it, but when it controls us. We must abandon ourselves to art in its natural environment, and in our case this environment is the liturgy. If we “museumize” these repertoires, even within the liturgy, rendering them sterile, we only betray their essence, their fecund capacity which has given life through all ages to great music (and to great art in general).

The philosopher Marcello Veneziani says it very well: “The trouble is that beauty just is, while ugliness advances, moves, speaks, acts. Beauty is inert, passive, defenseless, while ugliness advances, infiltrates, agitates. Beauty is a legacy, a lineage, sometimes a ruin, in any case declined toward the past or lost in antiquity; while ugliness is a language, a mode of doing, of understanding and of willing, between the technique and the administration. This is our economical and metaphysical, aesthetic and social, urbanistic and literary tragedy. The beautiful attains the sphere of being, but not that of the eternal and immutable. The ugly, on the other hand, attains the sphere of doing and of becoming, and is viral, expansive, progressive”

...This idea of tradition is tied to the idea of past. Tradition is the past. I think this idea is completely erroneous. Tradition is the future: tradition is possibility of new life that springs from a river which runs from time immemorial: “Nostalgia for the future. Perfect expression because it indicates the circularity of time, the necessity of marrying the memory of the past to the expectation of the future and to restore to continuity among generations the most vivid sense of tradition which comes from afar and pitches forward into the future. Just has the history of the twentieth century has demonstrated, the future without tradition loses itself in the night of the present: every attempt to live the future, erasing the origin, has dragged even the future into the death of history. He who kills his own father is destined to suppress his own children, or makes himself to be killed by them, by a perverse tradition. The future is tradition in its coming version, it is its tomorrow. Every new beginning is a return to the origin.

Scruton tells us in How to be a Conservative (2014) that tradition is not an instinct of accumulation, but rather resources of meaning for the future. He explains that the most relevant social traditions are not mere arbitrary usages, survived in the modern world: they are, rather, forms of knowledge, they contain what remains of so many trial and error attempts, which came about because people sought to adequate their behavior to the behavior of others.