As Bartók scholar Janos Karpati has noted, the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs occupy a particularly special place among Bartók's folk song arrangements; they are, Karpati remarks, "half-way between the simple and the complex." Karpati is referring to the stylistic shift which occurs in Bartók's folk song settings. The earliest settings are harmonically simple, with the original folk tune presented unaltered, supported by chords; the later, complex arrangements see the original tune blended into the overall texture of the music, which is generally polyphonic. In the case of the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs, the original folk tunes are preserved, and are presented clearly and directly, but at the same time, the supporting material is complex and musically significant in its own right. This collection of pieces for solo piano also contains the first examples of Bartók combining authentic folk tunes with his own, folk-like tunes, marking, as Karpati notes, the beginning of Bartók's "new compositional practice of not differentiating between the two kinds [of tunes]."

The tunes in this work are divided into four groups: Four Old Tunes, Scherzo, Ballade, and Old Dance Tunes. Most of these tunes come from Bartók's early transcriptions of Hungarian folk song melodies. The guiding formal principle at work in these pieces is variation form, a favorite of Bartók's. This is particularly evident in the Ballade, and in the Old Dance Tunes, which, comprised of eight pieces, makes up the bulk of the work. In general, the work has a modal flavor, and texturally there is a mixture of chordal and polyphonic settings. Bartók's musical language is chromatic, and dissonant chords appear frequently. However, this chromaticism is often decorative, and does not obscure the tonal orientation of the melodies.

As musicologists have noted, the organization of this work—division into four sections—suggests the divisions of the Classical four-movement piano sonata: a moderato first movement (tunes one through four), the Scherzo as a second movement, the slow movement Ballade, and the last eight tunes of the Old Dance Tunes as the quick final movement. Karpati notes that this structure represents Bartók's attempt to "elevate" the status of his folk material by incorporating it into structures belonging to the Western art music tradition.

The Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs is just one among many folk song arrangements Bartók composed during the years of the First World War. Along with a number of songs, he wrote many folk-based piano works, including the Sonatina (based on Transylvanian folk dance tunes), the Romanian Folk Dances (from Hungary), the Romanian Christmas Carols, and the Three Hungarian Folksongs. The only piano work composed during this period not based on folk tunes was the Suite, Op. 14.

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