Politics & Power Quote by Neville Marriner

There’s a quiet radicalism in Marriner calling an “entirely new, expansive repertoire” a virtue, as if discovery itself were an ethical act. Coming from a conductor best known for polishing the European canon to a high sheen, the line reads like a small confession: the old map of “serious music” was incomplete, and the fix isn’t token inclusion but repertoire-building. He’s not selling American Jewish music as a curiosity; he’s placing it where conductors care most - in the ongoing supply of works worth returning to.

The phrasing does two jobs at once. “Apart from the pleasure” signals genuine musical enjoyment while preempting the cynical read that this is philanthropic programming. Pleasure is the baseline; the “great virtues” are larger. That’s craftily framed for institutions that still justify commissioning and “diversity” through audience development or moral obligation. Marriner instead argues from abundance: this music expands what performers and listeners can do, feel, and program.

Context matters: late-20th-century classical life was wrestling with a shrinking canon, aging audiences, and a slow reckoning with whose stories got enshrined. “American Jewish music” in that period often sat in a cultural limbo - too ethnic for the concert hall, too “classical” for folk or synagogue categories. Marriner’s subtext is that the boundary itself is artificial. The intent is canon-making: to legitimize, normalize, and make repeatable a repertoire that had been present but not fully heard.