Excerpt from my current reading

After I finished off the latest Dickens tome, I wanted something fun and quick to read, so I picked up Strong Poison off my bookshelf and dived in. I've been reading with a perpetual smile plastered on my face because I love Dorothy Sayers's writing style so much! Here's a passage that had me cracking up:

[Lord Peter Wimsey has gone to a Bohemian party with his friend, Marjorie, in order to do some sleuthing. The room is small, hot, dark, and crowded, and a bushy-haired man is "playing something of a Czecho-Slovakian flavor" on the piano. Lord Peter gets pulled into a conversation with some of the party-goers...]

'...What do you think of Stanislas' tone-poem?' [said the cadaverous man.] 'Strong, modern, eh? The soul of rebellion in the crowd -- the clash, the revolt at the heart of the machinery. It gives the bourgeois something to think of, oh, yes!'

'Bah!' said a voice in Wimsey's ear, as the cadaverous man turned away, 'it is nothing. Bourgeois music. Programme music. Pretty! -- you should hear Vrilovitch's 'Ecstasy on the letter Z.' That is pure vibration with no antiquated pattern in it. Stanislas -- he thinks much of himself, but it is old as the hills -- you can sense the resolution at the back of all his discords. Mere harmony in camouflage. Nothing in it. But he takes them all in because he has red hair and reveals his bony structure.'

The speaker certainly did not err along these lines, for he was as bald and round as a billiard-ball. Wimsey replied soothingly:

'Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of our orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semi-tones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.'

'But why cling to the octave?' said the fat man. 'Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention.'

'That's the spirit!' said Wimsey. 'I would dispense with all definite notes. After all, the cat does not need them for his midnight melodies, powerful and expressive as they are. The love-hunger of the stallion takes no account of octave or interval in giving forth the cry of passion. It is only man, trammelled by a stultifying convention -- Oh, hullo, Marjorie, sorry -- what is it?'"

--from Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, published 1930