At the end of lunch, when asked to explain the story behind the Botkin composition that will never be performed publicly, the composer explains, “I was working on a DNA piece in early 2002, a two-part invention that was kind of an overdue twentieth-anniversary present for my wife Rebecca.” His tone is guarded. “A piece that was intended to be a wedding portrait, the way the Arnolfini wedding was painted by van Eyck as a wedding document in a certain sense, because we had decided to get married just a few months after September 11, and we did get married, that January—we just took ourselves to City Hall—and so I wanted to write this two-part invention, based on my DNA and her DNA, as a celebration of that. Rebecca was able to finesse getting the data for both of us.” (His wife has held various positions in the Clinical Genetics Department at the Yale School of Medicine for twenty years, until June of last year.)

“So,” Botkin continues, warming to the subject, “I was using our DNA patterns to build the piece, starting with the beginning, those opening statements where you always want to have a question, something with energy and tension, music with significant expansion of register in the first phrase, which opens it all up to new territory and suggests a future goal, you know?” He pauses to consider his words. “Something that makes people want to hear what’s going to happen next, basically,” he simplifies. “But what came up in the first movement, as I mapped it out using our DNA sequences in a corresponding musical relationship, the way I work, was this huge surprise—there was this unexpected harmony. Literally. We harmonized. Rebecca and I harmonized in a way that two random, unrelated people just wouldn’t. So that became the opening question. Her colleagues in Yale genetics took a look at our DNA and concluded that we had a common ancestor three generations back. And that was the answer. Neither of us had realized this at all, but we figured it out right away once this came to light. So that was a surprise, but it also answered some questions about some important things for both of us. This is private music. I wrote it as a gift for Rebecca.”

Leaving the restaurant, Botkin’s eye is caught by last night’s New York Knicks game being rebroadcast on a sports channel on the television over the bar. “You know when the crowd sings ‘air ball’?” he muses. “You know, when the crowd spontaneously sings ‘Airrrrrrrr baaaaalllllllll’ at basketball games?” Botkin repeats, demonstrating in his pleasant singing voice. “They always sing the ‘air’ in A and the ‘ball’ in F sharp. A minor third. The whole crowd just spontaneously sings those two notes every time. So basketball crowds are inevitably in D major. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

Back at his loft, Botkin has agreed to play the Whopdiddly Duet on the piano. There is a stroller in the hallway outside his front door that wasn’t there earlier. Rebecca Gottesfeld, petite and dark-haired, bearing a strong resemblance to photographs of her famous grandmother, welcomes us back from lunch. She has come home from an outing to Washington Square Park with their twenty-month-old Chinese daughter, Pauline, whom the couple adopted this past November.