Creativity Quote by Neville Marriner

“I think” does a lot of work here: it’s Marriner soft-pedaling a conviction he probably held pretty firmly. As a conductor who spent decades in the trenches of performance, he’s allergic to hype. So instead of declaring the Beveridge (likely a specific score, arrangement, or recording) “important,” he shifts authority away from the tastemaker and onto the object itself. “Quality” becomes something almost biological: if it’s real, it survives.

The phrase “something like the Beveridge, for instance” is a small act of modesty and a subtle flex. Modesty because he’s framing it as one example among many, not a crusade. A flex because naming a work in casual passing signals a working musician’s intimacy with repertoire, the kind of shorthand that assumes a shared listening culture. He’s speaking from inside a world where careers get built on noise - premieres, critics, fashions, funding cycles - and where plenty of “important” works expire the moment the press release does.

“A life of its own” is the quiet rebuke. Marriner is telling you that the best music doesn’t need a permanent marketing escort. It will keep moving from stand to stand, player to player, ear to ear, because it contains its own reason to be replayed. Coming from a musician associated with clarity, discipline, and long-term stewardship of recordings, the subtext is also institutional: don’t over-curate posterity. Put the work out, perform it well, and let time do the judging.