He holds the title of Professor Emeritus in the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
thesis for Colorado College, written in 1952,[4] concentrated on the musical culture of Old Order Amish and of Old Colony Mennonites.
Most of the compositions he discusses are for keyboard, especially Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin, but he has also written about opera (Don Giovanni) and song cycles (Schumann's Liederkreis, Op.
Burkhart introduces the term "Ursatz parallelism"[8]—when a motive in a small span of music (foreground) duplicates one covering a far longer span (background)—but because of its generality (and the abstract nature of the Ursatz) such a figure alone normally does not create significant motivic associations within a composition.
The limit in breadth of such parallelisms may be found in another oft-cited example: Schubert's "Erlkönig", where Burkhart finds that two motives in the piano's introduction map onto the key sequence of the entire song.