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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT Heeding the call of the harp
Music has been a lifelong companion of Sarasota Orchestra’s Hannah Cope Johnson.
MONICA ROMAN GAGNIER ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” goes the familiar joke.
“Practice, practice, practice.”
That mantra has certainly been true for Hannah Cope Johnson, the principal harpist in her first season at the Sarasota Orchestra. Johnson, age 27, started playing the harp when she was just 5 years old and was practicing three hours a day by the time she was a teen.
But it takes more than practice to become a successful harpist; it requires a commitment to transporting the instrument, which generally weighs close to 100 pounds.
“You definitely have to have an SUV and a hand truck, kind of like the ones the FedEx guys use when they deliver big packages,” Johnson says.
Tuba and cello players also know what it’s like to lug around a cumbersome instrument, but the harp is in a class of its own.
A native of Salt Lake City, Utah, Johnson comes from an artistic family. Her father has supported his family as a singer/songwriter within the Church of Latter Day Saints, while her mother was a ballerina and taught ballet. “I had the example growing up that it was possible to earn a living as an artist,” she says.
A Musical Way Of Life
In Salt Lake City, there were lots of young women studying the harp, so Johnson was by no means unique. “In the Church of Latter Day Saints, families want their children to study music,” she says.
Johnson wasn’t the one who decided she should learn to play the harp, she says; it was something her mother decided. “My older sister was studying the piano, and she wanted me to try something different,” she says.
When she was a child, going to
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