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Pop Goes Classical Puzzler

It was inevitable. Just a matter of time before Carly Rae Jepsen's smash hit "Call Me Maybe" would get the classical music treatment. And why not? If President Obama has his own version, why not dress the peaches-and-cream pop tune up in strings and arrange it for a multi-part choir? That's what you'll see in the video above.

But this classicalization of pop songs is nothing new. Remember Symphonic Pink Floyd? Or how about Joseph Haydn, who dressed up a popular Croatian tune and plopped it into his Symphony No. 104? And it works the other way around, too. Many pop and jazz artists have hijacked classical melodies and put a pop spin on them.

In the spirit of these often annoying, sometimes surprising collisions between classical and pop, here's a little puzzler. Click and listen to each pop-dressed-as-classical clip, then drag it to the album on which the song first appeared. Get them all right and celebrate your confident straddling of the great highbrow/lowbrow divide. Get them wrong and feel a spasm of inferiority.

Have some pop-posing-as-classical favorites of your own? Tell us about them in the comments section.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tom Huizenga is a producer for NPR Music. He contributes a wide range of stories about classical music to NPR's news programs and is the classical music reviewer for All Things Considered. He appears regularly on NPR Music podcasts and founded NPR's classical music blog Deceptive Cadence in 2010.