December issue of _Music_:

"Touch in general is of two kinds, that based upon the blow
principle and that based upon the principle of pressure. The
former was the kind of touch universally prevalent. It is
exemplified in extreme degree in Plaidy's _Technical Studies_, and
in Lebhert and Stark. Unmodified by other ideals, it produces a
hard, rigid, unelastic touch, and a corresponding dryness and
monotony of tone quality such as makes really expressive and
artistic piano-playing impossible. This is the reason why the
Stuttgart Conservatory, with its hundreds of pupils, yearly turns
out no real artists. The pressure principle has found place in the
playing of many European pedagogues without being adequately
analyzed or explained. Julius Knorr and his pupils employed this
kind of touch with beautiful effect; but if any of them even so
much as mentioned the distinction between blow and pressure, I
have never been able to hear of it.

"The two most valuable means of producing that condition of the
nervous and muscular apparatus on which a sympathetic touch, based
on the pressure principle, depends, are, so far as I am aware, the
two-finger exercise of Dr. William Mason, and the up-arm touch.
This latter is very lightly touched upon in the first volume of
Mason's _Touch and Technic_; but it is of enormous value, as I
have had occasion to know in the experience of the last years, and
vastly more can be done with it than most players and teachers are
aware."

I also stated in my last that Von Buelow was not a _great_ pianist.
But that he was a _popular_ pianist there can be no doubt, though
why he was popular it is hard to understand; for, according to
Finck, Von Buelow was a pianist in whom the intellectual greatly
overbalanced the technical and emotional; and so his playing,
while it might be interesting in a certain sense, was really dry
from its lack of the emotional quality. Perhaps if Von Buelow had
been born half a century later he might have been a greater
pianist, for at present the advantages for piano students are much
greater than formerly.

I suppose that when Von Buelow was young Stuttgart and similar
schools were in the lead, and from those his technic touch and
emotional tendencies could not be as fully developed as at the