Bartók's earliest works for piano and voice were modeled after the German Lied: his songs from around the turn of the century use German texts, and clearly show the influence of such famous lied composers as Schubert and Schumann. However, in the early years of the century, Bartók's music in general began to assume a more Eastern European flavor, as he began transcribing and collecting folk songs from his native Hungary and the surrounding countries. Village Scenes is just one of several large groups of folk songs composed by Bartók over the course of twenty years, including the Hungarian folk song collections of 1907 and 1917, and the Twenty Hungarian Folksongs of 1929.

Village Scenes was first composed as a group of five songs for female voice and piano, later scored for voice and chamber orchestra. The tunes were taken from actual folk songs, transcribed by Bartók in the Zolyom county of Old Hungary during the years 1915 - 16. This work, in many ways, recalls Stravinsky's hybrid ballet/cantata The Wedding, which Stravinsky finished a year before Bartók's work. While the two composers probably did not directly influence each other at the time, there are many striking parallels in their stylistic development: both made extensive use of their own national folk music and were eventually able to compose their own original folk tunes, and both composed music in a neoclassic style in the 1920s and 30s. For Stravinsky, The Wedding represented the perfect assimilation of the Russian folk style, an abstract representation of Russian peasant wedding rituals. Bartók's Village Scenes is also concerned with authentic folk music and, at least in part, with peasant wedding scenes . Village Scenes is a cycle, comprised of dance songs, lullabies, haymaking songs, and wedding songs.

The original folk melodies are modal, using Lydian and Mixolydian modes. Typical of Bartók, the interval of a fourth is prevalent, in particular the augmented fourth—or tritone—a dissonant interval popular in both early twentieth-century music and in the Slovak folk music tradition. In some of the songs, Bartók's piano accompaniment uses notes derived from the folk melodies, as the composer strove to unify piano and voice, to make these songs homogenous compositions. In other songs, Bartók uses broken chords or folk dance rhythmic figures to set the original melodies.

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