Two weeks later, Botkin takes a much-needed day away from the ongoing Triangle Oratorio rehearsal schedule, which now includes the orchestra. Over a quick lunch he has agreed to explain something of the process he uses to extract inspiration from the natural forms and systems that he tends to build on.

“It’s really just a simple paraphrase of the duetted call of the tropical bay wren,” he begins, opening a battered folder and laying out a densely inked musical score on the table in the neighborhood restaurant around the corner from his loft. “A friend of mine out in California has devoted her life to studying these little Panamanian songbirds, and she sent me one of her papers a while ago. This is exactly the sort of discovery that inspires me. These amazing little birds sing male and female parts in duet, which is utterly intriguing. The complex two-sex song patterns”—here Botkin interrupts himself to demonstrate with a credible whistled “whopdiddly whopdiddly whopdiddly” tropical bay wren imitation—“pose quite interesting questions for scientists about learning, and about how the males and females know how to sing the right parts of the song, with the boys ‘whopping’ and the girls ‘diddlying.’”

He sings the opening of this work in progress, which he is calling Whopdiddly Duet for Cello and Piano, the melody in his reedy tenor a vivid expansion of the simple birdsong into something vigorously endearing and joyful. He sings through the opening bars a second time, explaining the melodic line of the piano first, and then the cello line, taking them apart and then putting them back together. His simple construction strategies for this piece contrast with the Triangle Oratorio, which he says he modeled on Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah Oratorio in certain ways.

“When you think of oratorio as a form, most people think of Handel or Bach, but Handel and Bach both use solo vocalists for recitatives, with very thin instrumental support. I wanted something that hews more closely to the Mendelssohn model, both for the more overtly dramatic narrative sensibility and also because, as is true of Elijah, the Triangle Oratorio will be performed by a full chorus—146 voices, plus the children’s choir that comes in at the end—that is almost never without a massive orchestral support.” He chose the oratorio form, he says, because “all oratorios carry an implicit morality, and while the Triangle Oratorio isn’t specifically religious, I did want it to carry that kind of spiritual weight.”

Botkin rakes his fingers through his thatch of hair and grins ruefully. He goes on to say, “I have written something that will probably be called theatrical by the critics, who might well say that I am ‘not serious,’ but I can live with that. Don’t forget that when Porgy and Bess premiered, Gershwin had to live with Virgil Thomson’s accusation of ‘fake folklore and gefilte fish orchestration.’ I want the story of what happened at the Triangle Waist Company on March 25, 1911, to be felt and understood and honored by anyone who hears this piece. I want listeners to feel it in their bones. And I want it all to flow together—voices, orchestra—to be overwhelming, on the verge of chaotic, which is one of the reasons I use all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. I didn’t want to break it into more traditional and civilized distinct pieces, like, say, Bach’s cycle of cantatas.”