While these pieces for piano are named Romanian Dances, they are not exactly authentic Romanian tunes, as one might expect from Bartók, the collector of Eastern European folk music; rather, they are based, more or less, on themes of Bartók's own invention. Late in 1908, Bartók traveled to Transylvania, and began notating folk melodies. The following year, the year of the Romanian Dances, found Bartók again in Romania, where he collected hundreds of melodies. Bartók, influenced by the Romanian folk dance idioms, composed some of his own "folk melodies." While he asserted the originality of his thematic material in these two Dances, it is important to note that the second in the set does contain part of an actual Romanian folk melody in its main theme.

The first dance is an Allegro vivace. Its tune is very similar in character to a true folk tune, and Bartók uses rhythmic motives associated with the music of the Romanian jew's harp. The composer also includes certain musical effects suggesting the jew's harp, including drones, which also suggest the peasant bagpipes. This first dance makes use of whole tone scales and Bartókian polymodes—that is, pitches from two modes combined to make a single scale. The second dance uses a melody borrowed from a folk song, rather than an instrumental dance piece. This borrowed folk material is incorporated into Bartók's second dance as the second theme. Harmonically, this second piece includes instances of pentatonicism, polymodality, and whole tone scales.

Bartók's shaping of his material is very straightforward, even somewhat rigid: each motive fills a single bar, and bars are grouped into units of four, connected by varied episodic material. Motives and phrases are repeated, but Bartók continuously changes the harmonization of the tune, to avoid boring repetition and stasis. Each of the two dances has a definite tonal orientation, despite Bartók's modal chromaticism: the first piece is in the key of C minor, the second in G major. Key integrity is maintained through the use of pedal points and ostinati, which form the foundation of the work's essentially simple harmonic structure. Like much of Bartók's piano music, these pieces are decidedly percussive timbrally and are full of vigorous rhythms, and like many of Bartók's early folk-inspired works, there is very little of his usual contrapuntal writing.

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