The direction of the Monday Popular Concerts has also been undertaken by Professor Johann Kruse, who was well known as a member of Dr. Joachim’s Berlin Quartett. The Joachim Chamber Concerts will also be continued, the artists, as before, being Messrs. Joachim, Halir, Wirth, and Hausmann. Mr. Willy Hess’s Quartett, the Newland Smith Trio, Messrs. Metzler’s concerts, the Mozart Society’s concerts, and those of Mr. Donald Tovey (which are of high importance), are among the Chamber Music Institutions that have recently come into notice. In many of our provincial towns and cities, too, societies for the cultivation of chamber music are, in a quiet way, doing excellent work. These are too numerous to set forth in detail; but, as exemplifying the good influence which it, like many such institutions in other places, has for a long time exerted, the Chamber Music Society of Newcastle-on-Tyne may be mentioned. This Society a while ago set an example, which might well be followed by others, in commissioning our English composer, Villiers Stanford, to write a string Quartett (op. 44 in G major), which was performed at one of the Society’s concerts shortly after it appeared. [Sidenote: =Japanese Chamber Music=] It has been stated by a writer,[12] who, by the way, is not afraid boldly to declare the truth “that the amateur is the backbone of a nation’s music”—that a Chamber Music Society has been founded through the influence of an English amateur at Tokio, in Japan. He tells us that the violinist who leads at these concerts has been engaged by the Japanese Government to teach at the Tokio Conservatoire, and that he has already turned out some excellent Japanese pupils, at any rate so far as technique is concerned, one girl especially having become a really good viola player. [Footnote 12: W.W. Cobbett, _Musical News_, May 24, 1902.] CHAPTER III. HAYDN, P.E. BACH, DITTERSDORF, HANDEL. J.S. Bach—Joseph Haydn—Philipp E. Bach—Dittersdorf—Early quartetts of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—Silence as an effect in music—Haydn’s quartetts—Haydn’s Kaiser Quartett—Haydn’s other chamber music—Handel. Haydn (1732-1809) has been called the “Father of the Symphony,” and by some the origin of the Quartett (meaning, of course, that for strings) has been ascribed to him.