← The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour
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- [00:07]
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From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country. This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. This the special year end extravaganza for 2025 as we say goodbye to 2025 and usher in 2026. We'll recap the most listened to programs from 2025. Later on in this program, we'll also talk with Hyperion Knight, who is your teacher for the brand new Hillsdale College online course History of Music Part 2. First, I want to thank you for making 2025 the biggest year to date in the Radio Free Hillsdale Hours history. Meaning more people listen to programs this year than ever before for the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour and it's a joy and a blessing to continue to be a growing entity here in the podcast space in 2025. More people are hearing the program. That means more of you are telling people about the program and we thank you for that. Well over half a million people listen to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour during the course of this past year and more than 2 million listen to Hillsdale College podcasts across the board. You can find more at Podcast Hillsdale Edu, but that includes the Larry Arn Show, Imprimis, Hillsdale Dialogues, the Hillsdale College Online courses, Podcast audio all available there. All available where you get your audio, we invite you to experiment, try new things, find new favorite podcasts inside the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. This year also, we expanded our radio profile too. This is also a terrestrial radio show. You can hear it on some of your favorite radio stations. It is now on 53 radio stations all across the country in almost 30 states across the country. We continue to expand. If this show is not on your favorite radio station, you can ask nicely the program director, the person in charge of the station, to add the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour to their weekend lineup. And you can go to radiohour Hillsdale Edu. There you can find a list of current affiliates of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. And that's also where you can direct people if they want more information. Radio radiohour Hillsdale Edu we also continue to expand on the radio front and to preview the beginning of 2026 a little bit. We have great conversations coming up, including with Stephen Hayward. We talk about Jimmy Carter and his legacy of the Carter administration. We'll talk with Michael P. Foley about abstaining with the Saints, low alcohol and no alcohol drinks as you celebrate feast days throughout the year. We'll also talk with Dr. Ivan Pongrasic from here at Hill. He's not just an economist, he's also an accomplished surf guitarist. We'll ask him about all that entails. And also Dr. Alan Gelzo, a favorite here on the program, has written a brand new book along with James Hankins. It's called the Golden A History of the Western Tradition. It's in two volumes. Each volume is around a thousand pages. We'll talk in depth but not get to anywhere near all of it with Alan Gelso coming up in 2026 as well. Stick around. At the end of program, we'll run down the five most popular shows, most popular episodes this past year of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. First, though, an extra gift as we end 2025, a brand new Hillsdale College online course is available, History of Music Part two. If you took part one, you'll want to take part two. If you missed part one, you'll want to hear about part two. I encourage you to take both. Our teacher for this is Hyperion Knight, a really interesting guy, concert pianist and distinguished fellow here at Hillsdale College, and he joins us now. Hyperion Knight, thanks so much for joining us.
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Yes, it's great to be with you again, Scott, and it's of course great to work with Hillsdale College again.
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Great to have you back hosting the second part of our History of Classical Music online course. You taught that first course which covered part of the time through history. For those who didn't enroll in the first course, tell us a bit about you, your background and maybe just a smidget of what they missed out on.
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Well, my background is a little unusual, which is why Hillsdale asked me to do these series of courses because I primarily think of myself as a music lover and just a professional pianist. Secondly, my father was a very serious music lover and by the time I was five years old, I was sitting around listening to Bach with him while I was practicing the piano on the and I chose it as my profession because of my deep passion for music. But I've also spent my entire life thinking about all of the great composers, all of great music through history and how they relate, how they are interconnected and what the music really means for us, especially today. So in the first course, the Pythagoras Through Beethoven series, I got to talk about the mysterious origins of Western classical music of of the great music in all our symphony halls, as it took literally 2,000 years to really evolve the scales and the musical vocabulary to give us Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. And these were tremendous breakthroughs, both artistically and technologically, scientifically, philosophically. Really, all of Western culture went into creating this great music. And. And what happened was it just kept evolving. And after Beethoven, we wound up with technology really playing a role as the orchestras got much larger and more powerful. Henry Stuy invented his new piano that was really powerful enough to play right through an entire orchestra. And we wound up with a glorious century of romantic music, which is in some ways the most popular of all because it's full of heartfelt passion and gorgeousness, gorgeous sounds created by the most magnificent instruments ever imagined, really.
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And you tell us there a bit about the early Romantics, which is where this new online course begins and why it's such a powerful point in music history. You describe music as a language that can express what words cannot. Is there a great example, perhaps, you share in this course, where a composer can capture an emotion in a uniquely powerful way?
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Well, I think that the capturing of an emotion per se is really what the Romantic era specialized in. And this is following Beethoven beginning in the 19th century, more or less, and then careening all the way into the 20th century and early modernism. All of a sudden, the music became not about the worship of our creator, as with Bach, or dealing with societal problems with aristocracy, as in most arts operas, or even really in having to conquer the cruelties of fate with Beethoven, but rather more trying to find out our place both in love of the world and love of music. And what this meant was the Romantic era was always going in two different directions at once, Both creating beautiful music to make the world as beautiful as possible, but simultaneously, it was trying to create real truth and understanding of a political system that made more sense for the world than the aristocracy that all the previous composers had lived under. And what you wind up with is composers who were going in two directions at once. For instance, with the great Frederic Chopin from Poland, he was simultaneously writing these gorgeous nocturnes, Night music that turned the piano into poetry really made perfume rise out of the piano, as Rubenstein put it. But at the same time, his nation was trying to become an independent nation, independent of all the Russian of the European powers that surrounded it. And so pieces like his revolutionary etude are making a dramatic statement about individual liberty, the kind of liberty that we already are starting to take for granted in America.
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Talking with Hyperion Night, he's Your teacher for the new Hillsdale online course, History of Classical Music, too. You can find it at hillsdale. Edu Newcourse. There's also brilliant and vivid stories about some of these composers of the Romantic era and elsewhere. Brahms Gathering Drinking Songs for an Academic Overture. How does storytelling and why does storytelling about these composers help people fall in love with classical music?
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B
Well, on a somewhat lighter note, I often mention that unlike great painters or great novelists, great musicians are usually singled out at a very young age. Their genius is recognized when they're 4, 5, 6, 7 years old. And as a result, they never lead normal lives. They don't grow up like the other kids. They're already treated differently. So many of them are quite eccentric, like Brahms, and as a result, always real treat to read about how they tried to relate to the real world that, you know, the rest of us live in. But they've always been set apart in a certain way. So all of them have manifestations in their lives that wouldn't make them really acceptable as our neighbors, but are fascinating to read about. For instance, in the case of Frederic Chopin, the great love of his life was a novelist named George sand, who was actually a woman named Aurora, but because she couldn't get published as a female writer, assumed this man's name and wore men's clothes and went around smoking cigars. And all of these people were united in creating the greatest artistry. But their personal lives were often very amusing. And you mentioned Johannes Brahms, of course, he was noted for, for instance, leaving a party and on his way out saying, if I've neglected to offend anyone here at all, I humbly apologize. He really, he lived on the outskirts, and it was a different, different thing for all of them. But partly this was because they were struggling with what the whole concept of great art meant in society. And I actually begin the second course here, Chopin, through Gershwin, discussing the ide of what beauty really is. The poet John Keats very famously said, beauty is truth, truth, beauty. But are those actually the same thing? I think they're not. I think that you have musicians who are trying to create beautiful music, but you also had people who are trying to inject reality into beauty. And so by the end of the 19th century, this had turned into an incredible schism in France. We had the impressionist composers who, like the impressionist painters, had found a way to make the world more beautiful than ever by blurring the edges. But in Italy, they'd gone in a completely different direction. Verdi's operas were full of brutal, harsh characters and by the time we get to Puccini, the opera is now called Verismo, which means veracity, the utmost truth in storytelling. And so it's now dealing with the harshest realities of our human existence, but still cloaked in incredibly beautiful music. So you have these two different elements pushing us into the modern world, where suddenly everything changed. And then, of course, with the world wars, a whole new kind of music emerged.
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Hyperion Night with us, you can find the History of Classical Music course at hillsdale.edu newcourse. It's not just historically informative, it's also performance based. As you're a concert pianist, as we've mentioned, how do you use the piano, the instrument, during the lectures to help bring the composers and these songs to life for our students?
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Well, I'll tell you, this was a real labor of love because not only did I have to conceive of the chorus, but I also had to prepare literally hundreds of musical examples to play along the way. And some of these are not too easy, I might add, particularly as we get to the end of the Romantic era, where I have to play examples from Rachmaninoff's second and third Concertos, in some ways the hardest piano pieces ever written. But there are many of them are hard excerpts from the Brahms Second Piano Concerto. And along with this, of course, I'm often playing my own arrangements of orchestral pieces that aren't written for the piano. But I'm trying to highlight what the music is about by just playing my own piano arrangements of them. And this gives, I hope, added life to what I'm talking about, not listening to recordings and not just talking about music, but actually playing it and showing the deep emotion both the audience feels and that I myself feel playing the music. And I think that it's worth mentioning now that I recently showed my outline for this course to a friend, and he described it as subversive. And I think we should go ahead and get into this area because the course is described as Chopin through Gershwin. Well, that raises the question, is Gershwin classical music indeed? How do you define classical music? Well, at the beginning of the first course, I made my own personal theory clear, which is that great music is music which survives the test of time, and that time is really the only judgment we can rely upon on these matters because we all have different tastes. But this gets very tricky when you get into the 20th century, because a lot of composers had a foot in both worlds. You had both the American jazz composers like Gershwin, who were writing music for symphony orchestra as well as for Broadway. And then you had a whole raft of composers coming over from Eastern Europe who would write classical music under one name and then take an American name to write popular songs. So the whole world basically came merged together. It was a unified culture where a conductor like Leonard Bernstein was writing for Broadway and also writing a Mass and also writing piano concertos. And I decided early on in my life that anything that survived the test of time had to be taken seriously. We have to treat it as classical music. So my course, the second course here ends with the American century. It ends with dealing with this real question of is American? Is Aaron Copland beloved Western style music, our real classical music? Is Charles Ives the more modernist American, our real classical music? Or is George Gershwin our real classical music, with his incredibly popular crossover pieces.
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Like Rhapsody and Blue on Gershwin, I guess. And the rise of the American sound, which the course essentially ends with this time around. What do you think that Gershwin, that style, that American sound, helps to tell us about America in that era?
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Well, in a sense, it was America. I mean, the Jazz Age created an American identity for a country that was all of a sudden the dominant world power after World War I. And America had only been marginally on the map musically until that point. But all of a sudden, the entire world was fixated on this. Even the European composers were borrowing from American jazz styles. Ravel used the jazz style in his Piano Concerto. Darius Millo would use jazz style in his works. It was everywhere, really. And this was a remarkable breakthrough. And I think that with that in mind, we have to accept the fact that this music that emerged from the rhythm of ragtime, which became jazz, the syncopated rhythm and also the melodies of Broadway, this burgeoning light form related to operetta, these two things merged into something uniquely American, which completely took the world by storm starting in the 1920s.
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Hyperion night with us. Concert pianist, distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College. Also your teacher for history of classical music, Chopin through Gershwin. You can find it at hillsdale.edu new course. Many people who aren't familiar with this kind of music, Hyperion, can feel intimidated by classical music. I don't know enough to appreciate it. I don't understand what the composer's trying to do. How do you help bridge that gap between beginners and even those who are already passionate aficionados of this type of music?
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Well, that is truly my mission. In fact, if you were to ask me what I do, I would say that I'm a salesman for great music because I want to make this music approachable both on a personal level, by knowing about the composers and what they were going through personally, but also at a level in which denotes themselves to have real meaning. They're serving a purpose. In some cases, they tell a literal story, but even if they're not, they're part of a cultural story that is the story of all of us, really. And the way I do this in the new course, Chopin through Gershwin, is by framing it around what we call the War of the Romantics, which is that there were those who believed, several great composers who were determined now to conserve all the great music that had already been written. They created, for the first time, conservatories. Mendelssohn started the Leipzig Conservatory, and Johannes Brahms was a scholar who was keeping all this great music alive. And as a result, their own music reflected this. Their own music was more traditional. It was the conservative side of Romanticism. And they were strongly opposed philosophically by the avant garde, those people, starting with Chopin and Liszt, who felt they could take music in a completely new direction. And as a result, you wound up with Warren Camps. That culminated in the great opera composer Wagner, who really, along with Liszt, was leading a whole movement, a new German school of music that was meant to be on the cutting edge and really what they considered the artwork of the future. Whereas the classicists, who were really romantic still, but were adhering to more traditional thinking styles and musical sounds, they were trying to keep traditional music alive in the same sense that we had inherited it from Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. So this is a fascinating drama, both musically and personally, as these different camps fight it out in Vienna, in Paris, and then ultimately in New York as well.
- [20:55]
A
One of the themes of the chorus, and something you've talked about here today, is that connection between music and culture. And as you said about Gershwin and the American sound, music is culture. Is there a particular composer, maybe Gershwin, someone else who best illustrates that connection between music and culture?
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B
Well, in a sense, they all did. And when you get into the 20th century century, you wind up with a very strong connection between, in particular, the Russian modernist composers who are part of a really major global modernist trend. For instance, Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka is really about the alienation of man in the modern world. And this is marvelously conveyed in his ballet by making the lead character, Petrushka, actually a puppet, a wooden puppet. And so he, as a result, does not fit into the world. And this is the theme of enormous bodies of literature from the earliest 20th century, the entire output of the writer Franz Kafka. Essentially was about the idea of being in a world that makes no sense. And Hermann Hesse likewise wrote about characters who were in a world that they did not fit into, the Steppenwolf. And so this is. This is a very big part of it. On the other hand, the American side of the equation, it was a very different thing. It was about people who for the first time, were treating love in a light way that coming out of Gilded age America, Gilded Age New York. For the first time, young ladies did not have to marry the man their parents told them they had to marry. And likewise for the men, there was romantic freedom. And this freedom was celebrated to the hilt in the American songbook and all the glorious things that came from the Roaring Twenties. So the culture is absolutely woven in every note of the music. There is no separation there.
- [23:03]
A
Hyperion for someone considering enrolling in the course at Hillsdale. Edu Newcourse, that's History of Classical Music, Chopin through Gershwin. What do you hope that they get out of it by the end?
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Well, I would hope that anyone who takes the course actually walks away both curious or I should say, at the very least, curious and preferably in love with these great composers. Because to really appreciate great music is a love affair that will last a lifetime. We all like pop songs on the radio, but particularly these days. Most of them you won't really relate to after just a few years. Whereas if you really love a concerto by Sergei Rachmaninoff, it will be a joy for you your whole lifetime. Brahms symphonies, the Tchaikovsky ballets. This music never loses its fascination, no matter how many times you hear it or how many times you might see it in concert. It's always fresh sometime. And this is what makes it great music, what makes it classical, because it endures, and it endures in our own lives and our own hearts forever. To this day, I can't say the names Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky without getting just a little bit of a thrill, because I know that as soon as I tap into their music, there will be something there that takes me to a new level.
- [24:35]
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Hyperion Knight is a concert pianist and distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College. He's your teacher for the new Hillsdale online course, History of Classical Music, Chopin through gershwin@ hillsdale edu newcourse hyperion, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [24:55]
B
Thank you for having me, Scott. It's been a pleasure.
- [24:57]
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That's Hyperion Night, the new course again at hillsdale.edu new course n E W C O U R S Before we go on this year End Spectacular as promised. The five most listened to programs of this year five most listened to episodes of the Radio Free Hillsdale hour in 2025. If you heard them, maybe go back, listen again if you missed them. Other people love them, so give them a chance. Number five this year, the fifth most listened to show how transparency weakens the deep state. This is with Dr. Khalil Habib, Kevin M. Shipp and Brent Klein. Dr. Habib talks about how examples of statesmanship in the Roman Republic can teach us about good government. Kevin Shipp talks about his book Twilight of the Shadow How Transparency Will Kill the Deep State. And Brent Klein continues a short series on the Harlem Renaissance as we talk about James Weldon Johnson, Number four on this list, How Trump Survived and Won America's Heartland. This with Selina Zito and Christopher Matsos. We talk with Selina Zito, who's political reporter for the Washington examiner, about the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump's life and her book, the Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland. It was a bestseller. She was here on the show. Christopher Matzos also joined us to discuss theater at Hillsdale College and told us why theater should play a role in a liberal arts education and also what we can learn by studying theater through the centuries. The third most listened to episode this year, Molly Hemingway on the Comey Indictment. Molly Hemingway, a senior journalism fellow here at Hillsdale College and also editor in chief at the Federalist, talked about the recent Comey indictment and more. Plus, Benedict Whelan joined us that program too, continuing a series on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in the year of its 100th anniversary. The second most listened to episode of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour this year, who Killed the California Dream? Susan Crabtree, senior White House and national political correspondent for Real Clear Politics, talked about her recent book Fool's the Radicals, Con Artists and Traitors who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All. And Jeremiah Regan, the executive director of Online Online learning here at Hillsdale College, told us about a different online course, the documentary Colonial America and the number one most popular most listened to episode this year, very recent, Scott Jennings Explains the Common Sense of Donald Trump. Scott Jennings, the senior political commentator at cnn, talked about his new book and bestseller, A Revolution of Common How Donald Trump Stormed Washington and Fought for Western Civilization, and also about the people Donald Trump has trusted to help him inside of his cabinet. Plus, Ava Downs, a current junior at Hillsdale College. She was a 2025 Junior Olympic champion in international trap shooting. She told us how she trains to compete at a global level and how her Hillsdale experience has helped her. The most listened to episode this year featuring Featuring Scott Jennings and Ava Downes well, we wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and we can't wait to get back to you in 2026 with new episodes of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. If you missed anything, find us at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. Remember, you also can hear new episodes every week on a local radio station. Find the affiliate list or encourage people to become an affiliate by going to radiohour hillsdale.edu. until next week, I'm Scott Bertram and this has been the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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Sam.