Chief function of the Pops concerts is to provide music for the fun of it, and last evening's Harvard night was an outstanding success from that point of view. The program was for the most part clever, rhythmical music entirely pleasant to listen to. The Borodin "Polevetskian Dances," the Cimarossa and the Gilbert and Sullivan choruses were especially effective. There was a strikingly small amount of froth on the program, in fact, the finale from Piston's "Suite for Orchestra," a vigorous movement, full of strongly dissonant counterpoint, was a little meaty, perhaps, for such a casual audience. This program culminates a year of cooperation between music at Harvard and the Boston Symphony Orchestra which has made possible performances of Beethoven's "Mass in D" and the Brahma "Requiem," and has added so much to the content of Boston's concert season.

Often in the history of music, men of considerable artistic stature are lost to view in the shadow of a contemporary titan who dominates his period to the exclusion of all lesser figures. With Bach and Handel towering over them the lesser composers of the early 18th Century have been almost entirely obscured. Vivaldi, Corelli, Teleman, Rosenmuller and Rameau are only a few of the composers of this period whom the average concert-goer classifies--if at all--as "like Bach, but not as good."

These composers are not lacking in individuality and originality. Like the lesser artists of any period who for some reason have not produced the consistently superior quality of work which would raise them to the very top, they have contributed much that is worthy of attention. Vivaldi, for instance, though primarily a violin virtuoso whose love of flash and dexterity often carried him to vacuous extremes, had command of form and gift for thematic invention admired even by Bach who borrowed extensively from his works. The Longy School faculty concert tonight at Agassiz Theatre will present Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"--decidedly worth hearing as a typical example of the formal clarity and facility of this less familiar music of the age of Bach and Handel.

To musicology must go a great deal of the credit for this revival of works of undeservedly neglected composers. To it also must go much credit for the rebirth of great bodies of musical literature--the medieval music of the Roman Catholic Church, for instance. American musicology, in the person of Carleton Sprague Smith, is making an attempt to revive another little known type of church music, the psalm tunes of early America. In his lecture at Paine Hall last Friday he began a discussion of the 17th Century Calvinist setting of these psalms. Mr. Smith, who is by no means a stuffy musical archaeologist, is as amusing as he is instructive. Next Friday he will continue his plea for the return of this charming music to the position which it lost to the sentimental hymns of the last century.