He played the Rhapsodies for his mentor in the department, the pianist Russell Moore, who was floored by the authority, the subtle optimistic clarity, and the uncloying melodic inventiveness of his music. Moore assured him that what he had composed was something entirely new and worthy, a work with the gravity and proportion of Bach’s First Prelude, but it wasn’t an imitation of Bach at all, that wasn’t what he meant, he assured George. The only thing it sounded like was Botkin.

George met Rebecca in 1981, the same year his Sea Change Symphony—based on arrangements of the sonification of tide tables around the world—won the Rosanoff Award at the international competition in Prague. By the time George and Rebecca had fallen in love and joined their lives together in the complex arrangement that worked for them and mystified everyone else, George had discovered that Rebecca’s knowledge of human genetics (she was at that time writing her Yale dissertation for her public health degree) could provide a lifetime’s worth of inspiration. The first weekend he spent with her in New Haven, George had been so fascinated by the beautiful forms of the graphs in her doctoral thesis, concerning a study she was running on heritable predictors of high-risk pregnancies and labor outcomes, that he asked for copies to take back to New York, where he spent most of the summer writing a string quartet based on her charts of the progression of natural labor contractions as compared with the artificial contractions of labor induced by the drug Pitocin.

The first time Parturition was played publicly, by the Tokyo String Quartet at the summer music festival in Norfolk, Connecticut, in 1982 (the performance having come about because it had won a minor composition prize), a pregnant woman went into labor in the fourth row when her water broke during the final “Crowning” movement—and she delivered a healthy baby just a few hours later at a hospital in Torrington. When, at a subsequent performance, another pregnant woman left in early labor during the “Pitocin” movement and gave birth the next day, the coincidence was played up by a feature writer in the local newspaper. Then the story was picked up by several television stations for the evening news, and it ran on the national newswires. Both women had been past their due dates, George had pointed out to the reporters who telephoned him for comment, so it wasn’t exactly a miracle that either one of them had given birth, but that sort of attitude wasn’t newsworthy, and the coverage continued to emphasize the extraordinary effect of his music.

By the last night of the Tokyo’s eight scheduled performances that summer, looking out at perhaps ten hugely pregnant women scattered through the audience in the big, resonant barn, all fanning themselves with programs before the performance was to begin, the members of the quartet realized they had to change their program to include one final impromptu performance of Parturition instead of the scheduled Fourteenth Beethoven Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Two women in that audience (both past their due date and one actually in early labor before the performance began) gave birth within hours of the concert.