Creativity Quote by Neville Marriner

A quiet three-part drumbeat, this line sounds like rehearsal-room realism and lands as a defense of motion in an art form that pretends to be timeless. Marriner, the famously lucid conductor behind the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, isn’t romanticizing “progress” so much as refusing nostalgia’s trap: if you insist that yesterday’s preferences were the gold standard, you turn performance into museum work. By repeating “is changing,” he makes change feel less like a controversy and more like weather - continuous, unavoidable, not worth moral panic.

The first two clauses separate what audiences want (“taste”) from how culture signals it (“style”). That’s a sly distinction. Taste can shift with generations, media, attention spans; style shifts with fashions in articulation, vibrato, tempo, even the way an orchestra sits onstage. Marriner is hinting that arguments about “authenticity” often smuggle in personal preference. What we call correct is frequently just what we’re used to.

The last clause is the provocation: “players’ abilities.” He’s not only talking about virtuosity; he’s pointing to training regimes, global competition, conservatory pipelines, and the technical baseline rising across the board. That undercuts the comforting myth that the past had all the giants and the present has only competent professionals. It also reframes interpretation: when technique evolves, so do the options. You can take risks because the floor is higher.

Subtext: stop policing performance with old yardsticks. Listen for what a new era can do, not what it refuses to repeat.