Kodály's second quartet is only half as long as his first, but integrates elements of Hungarian folk music more smoothly and intricately than its predecessor. Here, the intervals and modal harmonies of Hungarian music are essential to Kodály's style, but Kodály's complex treatment of rhythm and his employment of mild dissonance take folk music only as their starting point; this is clearly art music, not a pastiche of folk tunes. Particularly in the second movement, Kodály favors bagpipe-like ostinatos and appoggiaturas characteristic of folk song and dance.

The first and shorter of the two movements, marked Allegro, begins very much in French Impressionist style, but within a few bars the melody is beginning to employ more Hungarian intervals and a hint of a pentatonic scale. Still, the music remains more chromatic and harmonically unsettled than would be Kodály's standard within a few years. The meter is a rocking, Siciliano-like 6/8 and 9/8, and the sonata structure is essentially monothematic, each subject arising from the same melodic root.

The second movement is almost two in one. It begins with an Andante (Quasi recitativo), serving as a long bridge to the fast music that follows. When the 4/4 Allegro giocoso finally kicks in, the players are thrust into a dance suite, employing six different and highly contrasted motifs with strong Hungarian flavor; some are rather subdued, others are highly vigorous. Still, the music's ebb and flow remains free, though always with a strong rhythmic propulsion. Kodály also makes liberal use of pizzicato, suggesting a variety of folk instruments. Early critics mistook the style as Romanian, but Kodály clearly was evoking gypsy and Hungarian folk music.

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