Berkeley Symphony harpist Wendy Tamis didn’t start her musical life as a harpist. In fact it was her third instrument, after piano, which she took up in the fourth grade, and flute, which she began playing in the fifth grade. Her first experience with the harp came when she was 13 and spent a summer at the Interlochen, a music academy in northern Michigan.
Wendy was born in the Bronx, but her family moved to Arizona when she was two, and she spent her youth there, playing flute and harp throughout high school. After graduating from high school she went to USC, where she earned a double major in flute and harp. But halfway through her time at USC she attended a master class in harp at Dana Point, and that, she says, “is where I fell in love with the harp.”
Still, having invested so much time in the flute, she continued with her double major at USC because she wanted to make sure she didn’t want to play the flute anymore. But by the time she graduated she knew that she would be giving up the smallest instrument in the orchestra for one of the largest.
Wendy had met many people from the Bay Area at USC, and rather than returning to Arizona, which offered few musical outlets, she decided to move to the Bay Area, where she became a student of Anne Adams, who was then principal harpist with the San Francisco Opera and whom she credits as her biggest influence.
Berkeley Symphony was one of the first groups she played with in the Bay Area, but today she is also a member of the Fremont Symphony and plays with many other Bay Area groups, not to mention the Boise Philharmonic, which she has been playing with for the past ten years, flying to Idaho three to five times a year. Berkeley Symphony, she says, is different from her other orchestras because “Kent demands excellence and because the music we play is so much more difficult than my other orchestras. You have to work really hard, and the level of playing is really high.”
Not one to shrink from a challenge, Wendy says she enjoys the contemporary music Nagano programs. “I especially enjoy it if the part is difficult but satisfying,” she observes. Occasionally, though, she says composers who haven’t studied orchestration thoroughly enough make things difficult by treating the harp as if it were a piano. “You don’t have a keyboard in front of you that you can look at all the time,” she explains. “Your hands are suspended in the air and it is impossible to play one at the top of the harp and the other at the bottom and look at the music and the conductor all at the same time.”
Wendy and her husband, Scott Hampton, live in Martinez and own Clocks Etc. in Lafayette where they sell and repair clocks. Wendy is an avid backpacker and speaks enthusiastically of the 60-mile, 8-day backpacking trip she and Scott took in the Yosemite wilderness last summer. She also loves cooking and baking, especially desserts. Film is another interest, though one she doesn’t always have the time for. Thus one of her favorite things about playing in the Boise Philharmonic is a movie theater called The Flicks, where she sees two movies every time she flies to Boise.
—Richard Reynolds, January 2007
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