As a boy, Adolf Busch was expected to make even more of an impact on the world as a composer than as a violinist: admirers used phrases such as ‘a young Mozart’ to describe his facility in composition. Although he stole every minute he could for what he called ‘note-writing’, circumstances dictated that for most of his life he would be a summer and Sunday composer; his only other free time would be a couple of weeks at Christmas. Nevertheless he wrote an astonishing amount of music, in virtually every genre (his one attempt at an opera was abandoned). Like other composer-performers – Robert Casadesus, say, or Artur Schnabel – he had to live with the knowledge that most people would rather hear him interpreting other men's music than his own. Undoubtedly his compositional skill made him a greater interpreter, yet he had a real, continuing urge to express himself through writing music; and his efforts won the praise of many contemporaries. In the 1920s Wilhelm Stenhammar declared him to be the best composer then writing; and Donald Tovey took his music very seriously. In 1929 Karl Straube wrote to his friend the conductor and composer Siegmund von Hausegger:

Rudolf Serkin, who had a Busch composition performed at the Marlboro School of Music each year, on or near the composer's birthdate, felt that his father-in-law's craftsmanship was ‘first class’, although he was too close to him to assess his achievement objectively.