By 1908 Bartók was deeply involved in the collecting and arranging of folk music. For Children, his set of 85 piano pieces (reduced to 79 in 1945), was begun that year and finished in 1909. The Ten Easy Pieces also date to 1908, and while four of them are original compositions, two employ folk elements, and four are almost certainly adaptations of folk songs, including this one, the Slovakian Boys' Dance, though it is not known what folk song it is based on.

This one-minute piece begins with the energetic dance theme played rapidly in single notes, no harmony underpinning it until its third appearance. But here the music begins to decelerate, as if encumbered by the simple accompaniment itself. Subsequent appearances of the theme start out with promising energy, but always peter out, as if the Slovakian boys are losing their step or their interest in the dance. The folk-like character of the terse theme is quite simple, with several notes repeating and providing colorful rhythmic impetus.

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Ten Easy Pieces was originally entitled Eleven Piano Recital Pieces. The eleventh piece eventually became one of the Fourteen Bagatelles. While the work was published as Ten Easy Pieces, it really consists of eleven pieces: Bartók had been required by a contractual obligation with his publisher to produce eleven pieces, and so also included a Dedication along with the other ten pieces. They were intended, as Bartók himself noted, as a "complement to the Bagatelles," and their purpose was to "supply piano students with easy contemporary pieces." The Fourteen Bagatelles are decidedly more challenging than the Ten Easy Pieces; however, both pieces are very important in the context of Bartók's stylistic development, as they reflect a change in direction for the composer.

Like the Bagatelles, Ten Easy Pieces contains many of the stylistic idioms that characterize Bartók's later works, including the use of folk tunes, pentatonic scales, modes, spare, open textures, and novel harmonies. As with so many of this pieces dating from this period, the Ten Easy Pieces reveals not only Bartók's interest in folk song, but also his recent discovery of the music of Claude Debussy, whose experimental harmonies would play an important role in Bartók's development as a composer and in his desire to synthesize the music of East and West. The Ten Easy Pieces are also, like the Bagatelles, often linked to the iconoclastic Viennese atonalist Arnold Schoenberg and his Op. 11 Klavierstücke; however, Bartók's work antedates Schoenberg's, and is arguably more progressive than Schoenberg's then- scandalous music.

Ostinato figures are prevalent in these little pieces, sometimes constructed out of dissonant intervals. There are also bitonal passages in some of the pieces, although a number of Bartók's folk-inspired melodies are set with simple chords, or occasionally appear in unison. Of the eleven pieces in this collection, only two are settings of true ethnic folk songs; the other nine are "original" folk tunes by Bartók, whose vast knowledge of folk idioms allowed him to create melodies in his own "authentic" folk idiom.

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