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Just saw this old (but fun) post on the blog Mental Floss, “6 pop songs that rip off classical music.” Some aren’t so surprising–for example, the several rap songs with samples of dramatic orchestral pieces. If the combination of rap and orchestral backdrops and doesn’t ring a bell, see exhibits one, two, three, and four. Rappers (or more likely, their producers) are second only to late-19th-century romantics in their love of dramatic string music.

My favorite classical/pop hybrids, though, are the more creative–Connor Oberst of Bright Eyes channeling Beethoven via a stripped-down guitar riff; Janet Jackson taking inspiration from the avante-garde French modernism of Erik Satie (this one is awesome). As a side note, these clips confirm my suspicion that the minor V⁷-i is pretty much every human being’s favorite chord progression.

Obviously, musical quotation (when classical composers copy from each other) and sampling (the same thing, but in pop) happens all the time–purists might even say it happens in every single piece of music ever. But cross-contamination of recognizable motifs between different genres of music is much less common, and I like to play a game with myself to find the most obscure, surprising, or just plain incongruous example of this.

For example, Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto (“Rach 2″) immediately comes to mind as possibly the single most fruitful source of pop songs in all of 20th century classical music. Some of the derivations were famous in their time, but later forgotten, like this song:

You might recognize the vocal melody of this (which is even in the same key as the original) from the first movement of Rach 2:

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Here’s another song in the same style, this time based on the 3rd movement of the same piece:

The original snippet from Rach 2, movement III:

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Just to show what a melody-writing badass Rachmaninov is, here is a clip from the second movement of Rach 2. Before scrolling further, try to guess what song ended up using this.

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Now here’s the song. Note the replacement of almost all of the harmonic nuance of the original with a big dollop of 80′s melodrama.

Incidentally, “All By Myself” (and its use in certain chick flicks) is actually what prompted this blog post, as my friend Reed observed yesterday that “Every time I hear the slow movement of Rach 2 it sounds weirdly familiar.” I realized then that most people probably feel this way when they first hear Rach 2.

Of course, you could charge that Rachmaninov was writing 20th-century melodrama in the first place, so it’s not a huge surprise for its melodies to end up in more of the same. For a more obscure sample, I dug up this song from the underground rapper / fictional character Dr. Octagon.

And the source? None other than the second violin concerto by Bela Bartok, a lyrical yet almost completely un-hummable piece of modernism inspired by Hungarian folk melodies. Here’s the sample in its natural habitat:

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