Between patients, Rebecca tried George’s phone yet again. She found the waltz soothing, but she had to take another call before it reached its witty conclusion, which landed on the identical B-flat tone of the answering machine’s beep. She didn’t need to leave another message anyway.

Countless other musicians had, of course, by then begun composing a formless kind of music based on DNA and other natural structures in hopes of imitating his success, if not the ingenuity of his music, but most of what they produced was devoid of the innate rightness in George’s music, the quality that Ned Rorem called “Botkin’s trademark surprising inevitability.” A public willing to be entertained rather than moved didn’t necessarily take the trouble to distinguish the synthetic work of the followers from a true Botkin composition, and an entire industry of nature-inspired musical composition soon sprang up, for which George was unfairly held responsible. From Gershwin to Copland to Ives to Botkin, wasn’t this imitation—and the consequent vague dilution of the public’s appreciation for the original work—the fate of genius, an inevitable aspect of the marketplace of the great American musical tradition?

At best, the work of imitators sounded exactly like thin, second-rate Botkin. At worst—and the electronic people were the worst of the worst, George thought, obsessed and seduced as they were by the brilliance of the technology and the cleverness of whatever robotic system they had devised to transpose data into sound waves, rather than being guided by any deep sense of actual musicality—the music of the imitators was the sound track for fever dreams, music written by those who had only ever heard rumors of music. The music produced by all the Botkin imitators is the formless, tuneless, relentless music you will not be surprised to hear piped in just before your plane crashes.

George’s compositions in recent years were built around his invention of a simple universal amino-acid musical scale with which any DNA could be expressed musically.

“If I had this system ten years ago,” he had complained not long before to Rebecca, “I could have written Stark’s Requiem in an hour.”

“So what? I know a thoracic surgeon who can repair a torn aorta in ten minutes, while complaining about the expensive repairs on his Saab and what’s wrong with his second serve, but it took him decades to get there. Anyway, you wouldn’t have developed this system if you hadn’t written Stark’s Requiem first,” she pointed out with her usual logic. “And the techniques for mapping DNA hardly existed. You know that.” He knew that was right. He knew he couldn’t have written the Requiem even two years before he wrote it, whether or not he had the DNA patterns to work from. From that first inspired leap of faith when he wrote down the Protein Rhapsodies, George had always found that the time wasn’t ripe for certain elements in his work—until suddenly it was.

At age fifty-one George Botkin had at last learned to trust the convoluted and often frustrating process of finding his way toward the next big idea. It had been six years since he had completed devising an eccentric ensemble for these new DNA compositions, using vibraphone, harp, flute, guitar, piano, and oboe to represent the different tones of the peptide bonds. It was a system that seemed to offer endless and beautiful possibilities. Having the peptide bonds represented by these specific instruments was so clear and obvious, inevitable to his ear now, yet it had taken him years to find this simple format.