Botkin in his own words:

When I was an undergraduate here, I always loved to walk into Stoeckel Hall after I had been in the Kline Biology Tower for a lab, because through the doors of the practice rooms you can hear everything—movements of thousands of years of music written by human beings who have lived and died, and any of this music, at any moment, is being played or sung by music students of varying aptitude. I would wander in the halls and listen, and there would always be someone playing with joy, or with fury, or hesitantly and awkwardly, and some students always play every note on the page, while others always improvise, they can’t help themselves. These days, those are Willie Ruff’s students—they get in trouble if they don’t improvise. I would always listen for that too, the really inventive improvising you can hear through a door. And it often made me think that if I could walk inside a living cell, then I might hear something just like that, the amino-acid sequences being played out one by one, a note for each, and the cell would be performed according to the genetic score, so sometimes it would be played with absolute precision, but other times there would be mistakes, or variations. And some of those changes would be good ideas, maybe great ideas, and some would be bad ideas, or really catastrophic, destructive mistakes.

The work I was doing in my labs, such as it was, made me think a lot about composition, and how the composer is always confronted by choice within the context of structure. Nature has that same set of rules, and sometimes nature can be stunningly inventive, while other times nature really screws up. I was trying to explain this to one of my biology professors who knew something about music, and he pointed out to me that you could say that every generation of cells in every living organism is playing the genetic score of its species, or if not the score, then at least following the charts the way a jazz band follows the charts. This was such a simple thought, and such an amazing thought. When you consider it, you realize that the history of music goes back, what, maybe a thousand years, or even a lot longer than that, all the way back to prehistory, if you consider that the first music was composed for the human voice. But meanwhile the genetic code has been playing its own music for who can say how long, maybe close to four billion years.

Some of the ideas in my music draw on this vaster history, as well as on the more recent vocabulary and form of human music, though it sounds pretentious to talk about it this way. Composition is about making choices and organizing your musical themes. You write them; you move them around. You develop your themes. It’s all about the themes. You listen to what sounds right, what sounds wrong. There has to be structure of some kind, I believe, or it sounds bad, it just sounds like nothing. We all know that kind of fake music. It doesn’t take you anywhere—it just wanders pointlessly and it irritates you and you don’t even know why. We seek meaning in our music, at every level of consciousness, just as we do in our sentences, in our paintings. Why wouldn’t we?