In Bartók's opinion, his Seven Sketches represented a new direction for his piano music. In fact, it is really a two-faced work; that is, it looks both forwards and backwards. Bartók used a number of experimental techniques, along with whole tone scales, polytonality, and chromaticism in these sketches, but also employed clear tonal structures, traditional accompaniment figures, and folk song settings. These pieces are similar in kind to the Fourteen Bagatelles, composed in the same year Bartók began writing his Sketches.

There is great variety in this work. The first two pieces in this collection are somewhat programmatic. The first, "Portrait of a Girl," with its repeating melody set against shifting pairs of triads, has been described as an early musical portrait of the composer's first wife Marta, to whom the piece is dedicated. The second piece, "Seesaw," depicts the back and forth rocking motion of a seesaw through alternating major and minor chords, which occur in a polymodal context (ie. simultaneous combinations of modes). The third piece, Lento, suggests a homage to French composer Claude Debussy, whose music greatly influenced Bartók early in the century. Lento is dedicated to Hungarian composer and pedagogue Zoltán Kodaly, who introduced Bartók to Debussy's music. Debussy's style is reflected in the lyricism of the "Lento," along with the use of whole tone scales. Subsequent pieces in the collection, in particular the sixth Sketch, entitled "In Walachian style," make use of Eastern European folk music elements. This sketch was actually based upon a folk melody created by Bartók, an adroit imitation of a Transylvanian folk tune in which the composer employed traditional Romanian rhythms along with drones intended to mimic the sound of peasant bagpipes. The final Sketch is also Debussyian in flavor, with its combinations of whole tone scales, but also Bartókian in its use of polymodes, and early examples of cluster chords, dissonant chords comprised of many closely-spaced pitches. Bartók revised his Seven Sketches in 1945, shortly before he died. His revisions were, to say the least, minor, as he changed only a few measures here and there. The fact that his revisions were so inconsequential, together with his comments, also made in 1945, concerning what he felt was the pivotal nature of this work, suggest that Bartók must have indeed felt very strongly about the importance of the Sketches in his oeuvre.

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