The influence of the latter is particularly evident in comparing Bauer's 1917 work "Three Impressions" for piano to Griffes's "Roman Sketches" published a year earlier: each is an impressionistic-style suite with a poem preceding each movement. The discrepancy between the relative conservatism of Bauer's work versus the more experimental works she advocated in her writings such as "Twentieth Century Music" is partially explained by her publisher Arthur P. Schmidt's hesitation to support her early modernist inclinations in composition. Schmidt and Bauer, although maintaining a close relationship, notably disagreed on style. It is inferred that when Bauer's seven-year contract was about to expire, Schmidt requested that Bauer simplify her compositional style, as indicated by Bauer's response to his correspondence: “It is not stubbornness on my part not to write simple things. I can only write what I feel–and someday (soon I hope) I shall learn to do the big simple thing. I must do my work in steps–evolutionary, not revolutionary. I have so little time to write that naturally change of style is slow.” It is also possible that the experience of having her "Violin Sonata" (later published under the title "Fantasia Quasi Una Sonata") demoted from first to second place in the 1928 Society for the Publication of American Music competition expressly for its "modernist tendencies" led Bauer to adopt a comparatively conservative style of composition. Bauer did, however, play a significant role in the development of non-tertian harmony in American music. Along with Ernest Bloch, Bauer was one of the first American composers to experiment with quintal harmony, or harmony based on stacked fifths, as demonstrated in her 1926 solo piano version of "Sun Splendor" and her writings about it. The development of this harmonic technique in turn influenced the music of Aaron Copland. During her lifetime, Bauer's music was well received by performers, critics, and the public alike. Virtuoso violinist Maud Powell commissioned “Up the Ocklawaha” in 1912, an impressionistic work for violin and piano that programmatically reflected Powell's own excursion on the Ocklawaha River in north central Florida. "Up the Ocklawaha" was subject of much praise upon its premiere. In 1915 and 1916, respected opera singers May Dearborn-Schwab, Mary Jordan, and Elsa Alves were featured on two all-Bauer programs presented in New York, accompanied by Bauer herself.