Although very much an advocate of contemporary music, Bauer herself was considered relatively conservative as a composer; her works from the 1910s-1920s mostly contain a pitch center, and she only turned to serialism briefly in the 1940s with works such as "Patterns". Her music is generally melodically driven, using “extended tonality emphasizing colouristic harmony and diatonic dissonance.” Both impressionistic and romantic influences feature in her works, but Bauer's studies with Gédalge particularly marked a change in her style from conventionally tonal to a more impressionistic, post-tonal idiom as demonstrated in her 1924 works "Quietude" and "Turbulence". For the remainder of her career, though, Bauer continued to integrate both the romanticism advocated by her German teachers with the impressionism she encountered in Paris and in the music of her close friend Charles Tomlinson Griffes. 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.