An unusual amount of modern music, much of it of very recent composition, has been played here this season, and many people have been surprised to see that a rather marked tendency toward romanticism and lyricism seems to be succeeding the hard-boiled harshness of a few years ago.

Of course, one expects this in works like the Hanson symphonies (the third will be played in Sanders Theatre this week) and in Hill's Violin Concerto (also on the Sanders Theatre program), for these men have never been identified with the most advanced group of modern composers. But even the composers who adopted the starkest writing of the post-war period seem to have modified their attitude recently.

This latter group, disgusted by excesses of emotionalism and structural looseness, made a vigorous attempt to clarify their writing and restore classical formal principles. They threw out or slighted soft, luscious sound combinations and meandering formal styles which predominated in the music to which they objected. Now a gracious, less rigid type of writing seems to be coming back, perhaps because composers feel themselves on safe ground formally and not apt to fall into the excesses against which they reacted.

The Piston Concertino for Piano and Orchestra which the Boston Symphony played last week, for instance, has long passages in a distinctly lyrical mood. Roussel's String Trio, Op. 58, which was played at the Longy School last evening, shows how remarkably his style had softened since the time of his Violin Sonata and the works of his middle life. The same development is apparent in Prokofiev. The change from the acrid dissonance of works like the Scythian Suite to the out-and-out romanticism of the G minor Violin Concerto is one of the most striking examples of what has been going on in the last few years.

The change is probably not great enough to warrant the prediction, not an uncommon one now, that a period of romanticism will follow very shortly. It seems logical that a reaction should come after such a drastic trimming down of musical style as we saw in many composers after the War, but if the present classical sentiment persists, it should be enough in itself to hold within bounds a tendency toward the looseness and freedom of real romanticism.