Botkin, fifty-six, is a tall man, with a thick shock of unruly gray hair just beginning to recede, but he moves with the impulsiveness of an adolescent. He jumps up from the piano to find a notebook, digging through a pile of dog-eared musical manuscripts before he pulls it out.

“It’s an electronic sound, actually, that originates in the propulsion system,” Botkin explains, thumbing pages in search of his notes. “I called up the company that makes these train cars to have a chat with them, because it was just driving me crazy.” He polishes his eyeglasses on his shirttail and resumes scanning his notes. “The engineer I finally spoke to at Bombardier transportation explained why this sound is unique to the R-142 fleet. They have alternating-current motors that store electricity, instead of depending on a constant feed. But of course all the IRT tracks are set up for the old direct-current trains. So you hear those tones when these new, more efficient trains are gathering speed as they leave a station, because when they hit the higher velocities, which happen to correspond to those frequencies, you hear those notes. The Bombardier guy told me they picked optimal frequencies to make the trains run, but they never thought about what it would sound like.”

Botkin closes his notebook and pitches it back onto the table, which is piled high with manuscripts, composition books, and various journals. Is he considering a piece inspired by the 5 train? He laughs. “I did fool with it a little. But it would be difficult to work out, for one thing, without being too dependent on Bernstein, and for another, I have a problem with the R-142 ‘Somewhere.’ The actual notes you hear kind of fall into the cracks; they don’t correspond to true pitch. The first one is right between F sharp and G, and the second note is kind of an E, but not quite. If you have perfect pitch, this can really get on your nerves. It’s not really ‘Somewhere.’ It’s ‘Nowhere.’”

A native New Yorker, the only child of a high school history teacher and a social worker, George Botkin displayed sufficient early musical talent to attend New York’s High School of Music and Art, where he flourished. He was graduated with the class of 1968, and he went to Yale to study music and chemistry, to which he says he was drawn equally. Botkin’s dual interests came together in his junior year, with the composition of his seminal work, the now-famous Protein Rhapsodies, which were inspired by amino-acid sequences he was then studying. From Parturition (1981) to the Echinacea Serenade (1982) to Requiem for Stark Whitely (1986) to nearly two decades’ worth of the extraordinary DNA-inspired musical portraits for which Botkin is known (recent commissions have come from the worlds of politics, sports, and Hollywood), the tireless composer has produced a steady stream of work that has won him international recognition, worldwide performance, as many conducting opportunities as he can schedule, and a dazzling list of awards, including a 1987 MacArthur Fellowship at age thirty-seven, and blue-chip composition prizes such as the Rosanoff Award, the Grawemeyer prize, two Agoos awards, a Prokofiev first prize, and the Ryden Medal.