Isabella DeHerdt of Ashfield was playing violin by age 5. And then, at 7 or 8 years old, she got a guitar for Christmas and wrote her first song.
“That was the jumping-off point for where I am now,” says DeHerdt, a 17-year-old junior at Northfield Mount Hermon and a cofounder of the musical group Kalliope Jones.
And “where she is now” is on the verge of playing one of her own songs with the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall.
DeHerdt is one of four winners of the Fidelity Investments Young Artists Competition this year. Auditions were held on April 13. The student winners, including DeHerdt, also won private coaching with professional musicians, a $100 gift card, professional photos of their June 7 on-stage performance with the Boston Pops and six tickets to their concert at Symphony Hall.
During the first half of the June 7 show, each of the four winners will perform separately with the Boston Pops. And after the intermission, Broadway star Mandy Patinkin joins the Pops with show tunes.
For this year’s audition, DeHerdt performed “We Are the Light,” a song DeHerdt wrote and first performed at her school’s Martin Luther King Day celebration.
In Boston, DeHerdt will be playing the guitar and singing, while the Pops provide the orchestration. Her mentor, Melissa Ferrick from the Berklee School of Music, first went over the arrangement of the song with DeHerdt, then DeHerdt was to have a rehearsal with Boston Pops Conductor Keith Lockhart. The final rehearsal, she said, would be with the full orchestra.
“I wrote my first song with my dad, when I got my guitar for Christmas,” she said. “My dad was musical and plays guitar. And my uncle is a jazz musician.”
When asked how many songs she’s written in the decade since that first song, DeHerdt says: “I have notebooks full of songs. There are about 30 songs I’ve performed, but I’ve written many more songs than that.”
After getting her guitar, DeHerdt began going to five-day rock ’n’ roll camps offered for girls at the Institute of Musical Arts in Goshen. DeHerdt also started taking classes with guitarist June Millington, who was part of the famous girl-group Fanny.
“Sonya Kitchell taught me my first two chords,” says DeHerdt. Kitchell, who is also from Ashfield, is now a well-known singer-songwriter living in Brooklyn. DeHerdt has attended the IMA rock-and-roll camps for the last eight years.
At the age of 11, DeHerdt and band members Alouette Batteau and Amelia Nields Chalfant formed a girls’ band now known as Kalliope Jones.
Currently, Kalliope Jones is working on a CD, and they are planning for a CD release party in July at the Ashfield Lake House. Kalliope Jones is also going to open for The Nields at a concert this summer. They have already played at the Rendezvous in Turners Falls, the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton and Passim in Cambridge.
When asked how her band members feel about her solo success, DeHerdt said, “We all get excited for whomever of us gets to put her music out there.” She pointed out that her band members even came out to the IMA, where a film crew from Boston came out to create a “mini-documentary” on DeHerdt, which will be shown before she joins the Boston Pops on stage.
DeHerdt said the IMA staff was excited. “They get to see the girls that they’ve known since 8 or 9 years old grow. They’ve started it for a lot of us: We wouldn’t be where we are if not for the institute.”
At NMH, DeHerdt says she gets about eight hours per week of music lessons, which includes vocal lessons with Karen Hager and classical guitar studies with Joseph Marcello. Then she also practices eight to nine hours per week on her own.
Besides guitar and violin, DeHerdt also plays ukulele and piano. When asked what kind of music she likes best, she said she likes “swampy, Southernish stuff” — bluesy folk music.
DeHerdt has also been awarded a full scholarship for a week-long summer music program at Berklee College of Music.
Asked if she has ever played with an orchestra before, DeHerdt said, “No. This is my first adventure with that. This is something few musicians my age get to do, so I feel very privileged and honored to perform with them.”
“It’s the biggest venue I will have performed in, as a one-person act,” she said.
This year was the third time DeHerdt had entered the BSO Young Artists’ Competition. When asked what she has learned from her experience, she said, “I think that competition, in general, really helps you learn that rejection is not failure — you really learn to cope with that in a way that doesn’t completely take the air out of your interest in doing this.”
Those who want to hear more of DeHerdt’s music can go online for YouTube videos of her solo songs, and can also find music performed by Kalliope Jones on YouTube.