As for the things he does, most of them are the things that any good musician does: he makes his conception run just ahead of his execution, like a switchman who regulates trains from a high tower; he makes tone contrasts that—what do the critics usually say? Of course he does many things better than most good musicians: he throws out handsful of color that most of them would give their souls to achieve; he makes the piano sing more deeply than any one else has done; he strikes chords that no piano except his Mason and Hamlin has ever given forth; he never hurts the sounds, and he never applies music to the instrument instead of drawing music out of it, as even the best pianists have a way of doing. There is less diffusion of sound in his performances; you have a feeling that it is the most closely-thought music you have ever heard. He edits the composition until it is flawlessly adjusted to the piano’s best values. All these are essentials of his playing; but they are not the “difference” of which I wish to write. Harold Bauer uses the piano as if it were an instrument endowed with an intrinsic “significant form.” I once heard Fritz Kreisler play some accompaniments, and I shall never forget how he showed his feeling that the piano has a mysterious life of its own with which he did not mean to interfere. It was as though he simply touched the springs which set that life in motion. Not being a creator on the piano he did not try to do more than that. Bauer believes the same thing; but on top of that theory he builds up the edifice of his own “significant form.” With most pianists you have a feeling that what they want to say is interspersed with what the piano is saying on its own account, and the result is a muddle. What Bauer has to say is placed carefully on top of that life growing just beneath, and the result is the most consciously-intelligent art I have ever come in contact with. This is making the piano not what paint is to the painter, but what color is to him. There’s a great difference. Even Hofmann can use the keys as if they were paint—colors to be mixed into _color_; but to touch them as if they were color—something already complete and living—is to do a significant thing.