routine

George Gershwin and his brother Ira are a harmonious team. They play a happy duet in composition, although George plays his part on the piano and Ira performs his on the typewriter. Between shows the two write but little. Once they receive the outline of a plot, they really get down to work. They go over this carefully and decide which situations are best suited for tunes, and what type of tune. George Gershwin has no regular routine. Sometimes he is at the piano early in the afternoon, sometimes at three o'clock in the morning. When he gets eight bars that he likes, he can finish a chorus in a few minutes. He has been known to write four songs in a single afternoon. He composes very fluently. Once when returning from the tryout tour of Funny Face, he discovered that he had left two notebooks containing at least forty tunes at Wilmington, Delaware. When the hotel there informed him that the books could not be located, he neither raved nor stormed. He simply sat down and wrote forty more.

-- New York Times 27 December 1931