… Then I spent the rest of my childhood years waking up in the middle of the night with a book half open on my chest, and I still do it. I read between two and four every night. I sleep and by the time I get to two o’clock now I have to read. I read for two hours and [after] I sleep for another two hours, then I get up and work two hours.

FJO: That’s extraordinary.

BR: It’s a crazy life. Augusta’s even worse. She gets up at three in the morning or four, when I’m still reading. I hope this is not too trivial for you.

– Bernard Rands interviewed by Frank J. Oteri for New Music Box

and

As if exploring that exhibit [a Constable and Turner show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts] wasn’t overwhelming and exhausting enough, we plunged ahead to examine the museum’s famous collections of Oriental and Asia art, Persian fourteenth – to sixteenth-century paintings and manuscripts, and Egyptian tombs and statues. Our senses were reeling from all this magnificence; and I can’t explain how we had the energy and persistence to take it all in – all in one day. To confirm how truly crazy I was – and perhaps still am – my diary recounts that after that museum visit, I copied quite a bit of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms into one of my notebooks – that is, before dining at O Sole Mio, one of our favorite Italian restaurants in Boston, then catching a show at the Casino Burlesque, and then heading out to the Totem Pool [a dance hall] – all in one day!

– from Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty [Gunther’s autobiography]

So, what time did you get up? and what did you accomplish today? Reading stuff like this, I feel very lazy indeed.

More about Gunther’s book soon. And, this will explain the post title.