Politics & Power Quote by Neville Marriner

There is a conductor’s tact in Marriner’s phrasing, but also a quiet jolt of cultural re-labeling. He’s describing a familiar phenomenon in classical music: repertory becomes “normal” once it’s absorbed into the mainstream, its origins sanded down into neutrality. “Before” signals that kind of unthinking participation, the way performers and audiences can inhabit a style without naming the community that shaped it. Then comes the pivot: “in this case… you have now perhaps pointed us.” Marriner doesn’t claim discovery; he credits an interlocutor, and he hedges (“perhaps”) to keep the moment collegial rather than corrective. That politeness is the subtext: a gentle admission that the institution has been inattentive.

The phrase “American Jewish” matters because it refuses the old classical-music habit of treating identity as an asterisk. It implies a repertoire with its own lineage - immigrant histories, synagogue modes filtered into concert music, the Broadway-to-symphony pipeline, the pressures of assimilation, the politics of belonging in American culture. Marriner’s “new interest” is more than curiosity; it’s a shift in curatorial power. Once something is named, it can be programmed intentionally, researched, recorded, funded - or, just as easily, boxed into a themed corner.

What makes the quote work is its double register. On the surface, it’s encouragement. Underneath, it’s a subtle indictment of how orchestral life often naturalizes certain contributions as simply “American,” until someone insists on the fuller, messier hyphen.