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Harp concert will benefit the hungry


Once-destitute woman returns to area to pay it forward through music.

R-A01 Jasmine Hogan practices a Chinese folk song at the LioAn’s Gate Inn in Wake Forest Monday. Her concert offers a medley of music, transcribed for the harp.

By David Leone

WAKE FOREST — When Jasmine Hogan first took up playing the harp, her family was penniless and had to rely on trips to Tri-Area Ministry for food and clothing. Now she’s found a way to pay it forward.

Saturday at 2 p.m., the accomplished musician is holding a benefit concert in conjunction with the Wake Forest Rotary Club at Wake Forest Baptist Church to benefit Tri-Area Ministry.

Net proceeds of the $15 ticket price ($12 for students/seniors) will be donated to the food bank’s coffers, to help today’s unfortunate.

“I remember going there. That ministry actually helped to support us,” she said Monday. “To come back now and be able to do a concert and a benefit for them, you can imagine it means a lot to me.”

She also wanted to touch base with the people who helped her along the way, such as the Wake Forest Rotary Club.

“They helped me to go to Peabody (Institute),” the Rolesville native said. “I met them when I was 12 and played for a Valentine’s Day dinner. They were interested in me and kept track of me and eventually helped me go to school. I came back just for the concert. I’m really happy to be back.”

She first began playing at age 8. It was a challenge — there weren’t many teachers for the instrument in 1997-98. Plus, she had five brothers, and the instrument and lessons were expensive. So she had to earn her keep.

“I started working as soon as I could, doing weddings, doing receptions at 10, 11,” she said. “That’s good experience working in public, you learn a lot.”

Family trauma

By her early teens, Hogan was taking lessons in Nashville, Tenn., commuting there from the Triangle once a month. Then, in 2005, her father died and the carpet was pulled out from under the family.

“He was our sole breadwinner. Everything changed for us then. We lost our house and we lost our car,” she said. “The goal for me was to keep studying if I could. It’s not easy to be a music student. It’s expensive.”

Her music dreams might have ended, but for her own perseverance, and the help the Christensen family and Rotary, who helped her pay for music camp, then apply for grants and scholarships. She eventually won a full scholarship at Peabody Institute of Music at Johns Hopkins University.

“I had to have a lot of faith in what I was doing,” she said.

At Peabody, she received first place in the Baltimore Music Club competition in 2008 and third prize in the Second International Harp Competition in Szeged, Hungary the next year.

Upon graduating with her bachelors in music, she was awarded the 2011 Lynn Taylor Hebden Prize in Performance.

In May this year, the 23-year-old completed the Masters program in Performance & Pedagogy at Peabody, and recently received word that she was accepted into Peabody’s Artist Diploma program for exceptional and experienced performers.

The harpist kid?

While still in school in 2011-12, Hogan spent a year in China as part of a Rotary International music exchange program, winning a U.S. Fulbright Award to study traditional Chinese music at the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing.

Hogan tells how she was assigned to learn the Chinese harp from a Chinese teacher who owns a tea house.

“I was allowed to look at it,” but wasn’t allowed to play it. So I spent months just pouring the tea,” she said.

Each time she tried to arch her hand the right way, she failed, and poured the tea over her thumb, scalding it: “It was a beautiful tea house and I had a lot of fun pouring and drinking the tea. I kept asking my teacher, when can I learn the instrument?”

When finally allowed to try her hand on the Chinese harp, just like in the movie The Karate Kid, Hogan realized that the strange arched hand movement of pouring the tea was the proper stance to pluck the strings, and she automatically tucked her once-burned thumb out of the way of the strings as a result.

“It’s just like wax-on, wax-off,” Hogan laughed, referencing the popular martial arts film.

Opera stars and passers-by

While in China, she played harp for the National Center for the Performing Arts and she was a substitute harpist with the China National Opera Orchestra, occasionally working with Placido Domingo, Gustav Meier and Chinese Maestro Lu Jia.

Though playing with an orchestra is an honor, Hogan prefers engaging the public in close, intimate spaces. She began to focus on Chinese folk music, picking up two Chinese stringed instruments and learning to speak Chinese as well.

She takes music written for other instruments, takes compositions and even popular music and arranges them for the harp, playing in churches and classrooms.

She teaches harp to inner city youths in Baltimore’s OrchKids program, for instance, and plays with gospel choirs in churches there.

“Musicians in the gospel churches are amazing,” she said. “They can do things most conservatory kids can’t do.”

Hogan often plays in Baltimore libraries and churches, including the Baltimore Basilica. She’s also been known to walk down to the Fell’s Point harbor, perhaps with violinist and guitarist friends in tow, and perform in the open air for passersby.

“ really has to be in the realm of audiences’ experience,” she said. “I like to engage with people, to explain what I’m doing. I really want people to enjoy my music. I like concerts that are accessible.”

On Saturday, the audience will be treated to a sampling of the breadth of Hogan’s experiences. There are traditional classical pieces, and following a recent competition in Stockholm, Sweden, she’s transcribed a suite of Swedish songs for the harp, including an ox dance. And she’ll play a set of pieces she originally learned to sing in Chinese.

“First we hear the raw, the folk music itself, then we hear something from present day,” she explained. “Because we’ve heard the folk music first, we have some context, so we understand what’s happening in the more complex music.”

Wake Forest Baptist Church is located at 107 E. South Ave., adjacent to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

To hear a sample of Hogan’s music, see The Wake Weekly Facebook page.

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