John Williams: My Dad played in an orchestra. Spielberg’s was a subscriber

Simon Woods of the League of American Orchestras has conducted a revealing interview with the film composer, focussing on the orchestras in his life:

Sample quotes:

My father was a member of the CBS Radio Orchestra, and when I was ten years old, in 1942, he took me to a rehearsal at the Hammerstein Theater in New York. That was the first time, I think, that I heard anything resembling an orchestra. It was a large production for radio in those days, probably a 40- or 50-piece orchestra.

In my early teen years, when I was taking music lessons every week in New York, I would go to his rehearsals. I’d sit behind him in the percussion section in the back of the orchestra and listen. I was fascinated watching the trombones and the trumpets—amazed that they would rest for a while and then suddenly they would all come together for some magical reason. As time passed, I noticed the wind section and the string section and the harp and piano and so on, and it piqued my interest. As an early teen, I began examining some of my father’s orchestration books. So that was how I became familiar with the sounds that an orchestra makes.

Subsequently, I think the first orchestra I heard in a concert performance was the Los Angeles Philharmonic, after my family moved to Southern California. The conductor was Charles Munch.

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In terms of history, as you know, my father was an orchestral musician, and I don’t believe that when he was working in the 1930s and ’40s, orchestral musicians had pension or retirement funds or health plans. So I’ve had great pleasure in being able to do a number of pension fund benefit concerts for orchestras, not asking for a fee, but simply being able to support something for today’s musicians that my father didn’t have. We’ve made great progress, and there’s more to be done. I feel as a composer and a musician that I owe this to my orchestral colleagues. And it’s wonderful that Steven has joined me on any number of occasions. It’s been a great fundraising success whenever we’ve done it. He loves music, by the way.
Woods: Steven’s father was a subscriber at the LA Phil for years, wasn’t he?
Williams: I think he must have been. Earlier in his life when they were living in Philadelphia, they were subscribers, I believe, to the Philadelphia Orchestra. Steven was taken there as a child frequently by his parents. His mother was a very good amateur classical pianist, and he can’t get enough of the orchestra. Whenever we go out and do these concerts, he gets a childlike thrill from meeting the orchestra and accepting the audience’s applause when he arrives. It’s something we’ve done for a number of years, and I hope we can continue.