Creativity Quote by Neville Marriner

A polite sentence with a radical agenda: open the doors, let the air in, and accept that the institution you love will not survive unchanged. Coming from Neville Marriner, the conductor who helped professionalize and popularize chamber performance through the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the line lands as both self-critique and succession plan. He’s not romanticizing “the next generation”; he’s asking for disruption, and he’s doing it in the measured, almost English understatement of someone who understands that orchestras are built to resist surprise.

The phrasing does two clever things. “New people” comes first, before “new ideas,” which signals Marriner’s faith that culture shifts through bodies, not manifestos. Personnel is policy: who gets hired, who gets programmed, who’s invited to the table. Then there’s “come into it,” a phrase that acknowledges the guarded nature of classical music’s ecosystems - boards, auditions, gatekeeping, tradition as quality control. He’s implicitly naming the problem: the pipeline is too narrow, the room too sealed.

Most pointed is “change it,” not “refresh it” or “preserve it.” Marriner’s career sat at the crossroads of authority and accessibility - recordings that reached mass audiences, performances that prized clarity over grandiosity. The subtext is that excellence isn’t synonymous with stasis. If classical music wants relevance without pandering, it has to tolerate unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar stories, and unfamiliar sounds, even when they challenge the old metrics of taste. Marriner is granting permission - and issuing a warning: without new entrants, the art form turns into a museum with perfect acoustics.