Composers have always loved to integrate folk melodies into their works both for popular appeal and to show their ability to manipulate a simple tune. The practice was already common in the Middle Ages. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often made the mistake of equating the popular music of the day with authentic folk melodies. The melodies that Brahms and Liszt used in their Hungarian dances and rhapsodies, for example, were not indigenous melodies, but were the popular street and café music of their time – often played by Roma bands.

Zoltán Kodály and his colleague Béla Bartók, both pioneers of modern ethnomusicology, were among the first (in 1907) to use the newfangled invention, the wax cylinder recorder, to collect folk melodies at their source. They traveled extensively to the most rural backwaters of Central and Eastern Europe to collect their examples and were careful to authenticate their research. Critical to their systematic approach was seeking out the variations in music and text from different locales, in the attempt to determine the origin of the melodies and follow the geographical spread of both music and words. They avoided one of the great pitfalls in authenticating folk music, recognizing the fact that the simpler the melody, the greater the possibility that similar ones arose independently and were not necessarily derived from a common source. Like Bartók, Kodály used many of the collected folk melodies as themes for his compositions. Of the two, Kodály was the more conservative and the more Romantic. While his international reputation is generally overshadowed by that of Bartók, his music has become a national treasure in his native Hungary.

Marosszék is a district in Transylvania, once part of Hungary, but now part of Romania. Kodály composed the dances for piano in 1927, orchestrating them three years later. He used a number of ancient folksongs from the district, writing in the score: " It is perhaps no accident that most of the old folk-dance music has been preserved unto our days in the district of Marosszék and that some pieces are called “Marosszéki” even in other regions.

"It is probable that these pieces, known to us as instrumental, were originally sung. Of some of them the worded vocal has even been found. Until the war, one could hear such pieces in every village, played either on the violin or on a shepherd’s flute; old people used to sing them."

The suite is tightly constructed: a rondo, varied with each repeat and four sections of new tunes. The first offers a contrast in tempo. The second is a long Andante in which oboe, flute and piccolo decorate a simple tune with birdsong ornamentation. The last two melodies are again upbeat, and the final one concludes the piece.