Charles Burkhart

Research

Burkhart is known for work on the relations between Schenkerian readings, analysis of rhythm and meter, and implications for performance. 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. 39).

A frequently cited article is regarded as the "classic treatment" of motivic parallelisms in Schenkerian analysis. Burkhart introduces the term "Ursatz parallelism"—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. Thus, it is more productive to focus on how "motivic parallelisms operate within individual pieces" rather than as symptoms of a tonal system. Burkhart finds that the motivic parallelisms of various surface motives and their "hidden repetitions" in middle-level segments are "much more unusual and interesting." An oft-cited example relates brief motives in the first two bars of Chopin's Nocturne in F♯ major, Op. 15, No. 2, to larger spans: a neighbor-note figure that is also the frame of the melody in bars 1–16; and an arpeggiated chord that is also stretched across bars 1–45. As Burkhart notes, it is common—as in these examples—for the smaller motive to be nested inside the larger parallelism. 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.

Compositions

Burkhart's compositions include some organ preludes and choruses he has composed and arranged.