On Monday morning, a roomful of performers are miles away from their jobs at out-of-state colleges, leafing through notes and sheet music, stretching and doing vocal warm-ups in a chilly Quapaw Quarter studio when Bonnie Montgomery, the woman of the week, looks up from her keyboard.
“Alright, let’s take it from 83, okay?”
She rolls a few introductory measures out of the keys before Evan Jones and Chris McKay, both opera instructors, dive into their scene from “Billy Blythe,” Montgomery’s much-anticipated “American folk opera” about President Clinton’s childhood which, this Friday, will announce the operatic debut from the local composer.
It’s been a long string of “unlikelies,” if not “unprecedenteds,” for the White County native, 31, and her Bill-centric composition. What began with reading “My Life” in 2006 turned into a vivid vision of an adolescent Clinton with mother Virginia Kelley on an operatic stage, which then led to the beginning of an intensive, four-year-long songwriting session by Montgomery and fellow Ouachita Baptist University graduate Britt Barber, the project’s librettist.
Before releasing so much as a note of the piece, “Blythe” began to draw unforeseeable national attention from opera magazines and political newspapers, even popping up as a joke in a “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” monologue.