As many already know, Bartók spent his last years in the United States living modestly, if not in near-poverty. One source of income, of course, was the publication of his compositions. He unearthed these works and probably revised them in the period 1941-1942, almost three decades after he had written them. Boosey & Hawkes published the group in 1942. An early version of the first one, The Peacock, had appeared in a music magazine in 1924.

Marked Andante tranquillo rubato, this work opens sedately, stating a theme whose ethnic colors emerge more noticeably on its second (and last) appearance, where its manner is a bit more subdued and its flow smoother and somewhat sensuous. The first half of this one-minute piece is a bit austere, the music coming across as autumnal and emotionally neutral. It is not that the latter part ushers in summer or even spring, but it is warmer and more lyrical, the melody more songful and nocturnal.

The next piece is At the Janoshida Fairground, which is about the same length and only marginally livelier despite its Allegro non troppo marking. It also features a somewhat detached manner at the outset, which it casts off in the latter half by turning away from its literalness of expression and allowing the melody to sound more natural and less stiff. It is as though Bartók, in these first two pieces, is showing two emotionally different, though not necessarily opposite, sides of a melody.

The last piece, White Lily, at about a minute-and-a-half, is the longest of the three. Marked Maestoso, it is majestic and colorful throughout, exhibiting a stately, grandiose spirit from the first notes that grows more glorious as the piece progresses. The theme builds in a chorale-like manner to an impressive climax in ecstatic chords, whose mixture of upper- and lower-register sonorities imparts a colorful, celestial sense in its ascending contour. These three folk tune arrangements are among the composer's more impressive efforts in the genre, not least because Bartók casts them in harmonic and contrapuntal writing of considerable subtlety, especially in the case of White Lily.

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