Harvard men have such esthetic musical tastes." From the lips of Grace Lyons at McKenna's--and it could just as well have been heard at Briggs and Briggs--the phrase was a complaint. But just a little altered, it might by a shy boast of the Music Department, which rates partial credit for a most astounding revolution in Cantabridgian taste.

Indifference and its tradition no longer extend into the musical areas of University life, if the sales figures on phonograph records, concerts, and recitals mean anything. A new phenomenon of what might be called selective enthusiasm has moved in lock, stock and barrel: when Briggs & Briggs and McKenna's can sell out their first shipment of the new "Messiah" recording within two days of arrival, when undergraduates will line up for copies of Italian Cetra discs at $3.25 a shot, when the inability of undergraduates to find seats at the BSO's Sanders Theater concerts begins rumblings of revolt. . . the days of indifference have ended.

Archibald Davison, James Edward Ditson Professor of Music, views the apparent flowering of musical interest "as the natural culmination of the tradition started here 40 years ago." Professor Davison emphasizes musical participation as much as counter transactions: "The Glee Club, Band, and Pierian Sodality have all reached new high-water marks," he says, "while the Music Club is also experiencing a high-interest cycle. All this leads people to take music courses and from there to move to record buying and the eventual building of private music libraries."

There are probably other reasons--perhaps greater maturity of the student or just a surplus of expendable cash--for the rise in sales of what Miss Lyons might call "esthetic records." In any case, the Harvard record buyer has escaped from the stereotyped taste which characterized many of his ante-bellum brothers.

"Mozart and Beethoven symphonies and concertos still form the staples of his musical diet," says Crimson Network classical musical director Robert Hall '49, "but the student is developing a tendency to break away from well-known works to explore the less familiar vistas of chamber music and the works of modernists." According to Hall, the trend would never be stomached elsewhere. "At Yale, for instance," he says, "they have re-saddled the old warhorses--Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikowsky--and are riding them almost exclusively."

Hall's view of Harvard men escaping from these war horses to more unusual vehicles is corroborated by Miss Lyons and other people who have to take the guff on the other sides of the record counters in the Square. They are caught between the record companies, which pay little or no attention to orders, sending out what they please, and wrathful customers whom Ed Carr at Briggs and Briggs parodied recently as complaining about "the bourgeois practice of pressing a thousand copies of a hundred items instead of a hundred copies of a thousand items." Despite the irate customers and the indifferent record companies, though, sales are up 200 percent over pre-war figures in classical departments. Only time will tell whether the rise is the result of a permanent change in taste, or--like most of the other current sales figures in Cambridge--a mere product of floating GI funds.