People learn about the richness of classical music in many ways.

Some of us, as children, heard classical music in our homes. Some of us were given music lessons. Others got their first taste of the art form we love from school choirs, bands or orchestras. Lots of us learned about it from cartoons: We hear Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” overture and reflexively see Bugs Bunny toying with Elmer Fudd in a barber chair; a few notes of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 evoke an epic battle between Tom and Jerry waged on and around a piano.

But hardly anybody confesses to learning about classical music from ... disco.

Disco was the prevailing sound of pop music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The beat was insistent and infectious. Across the country, the music turned disused skating rinks and stale nightclubs into vibrant (and vibrating) dance clubs that thrived, at least until tastes shifted a few years later.

There was no escaping that sound thanks to "Saturday Night Fever." The John Travolta movie was inspired by Nik Cohn’s New York magazine article about a Brooklyn kid who lived to show off his dance moves at a club in Bay Ridge. (It turns out Cohn’s article was not especially factual, and that really is another story, which you can read here.) The collection of songs from the movie held the world record for highest-selling soundtrack album for 15 years and has been added to the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress for its “cultural significance.”

Saturday Night Fever.

(Wikipedia Commons/Wikipedia Commons)

Disco touched just about everything. Even before "Saturday Night Fever" appeared, the disco beat and the symphony orchestra had been united in what some music lovers considered a forced marriage, namely, “A Fifth of Beethoven,” a record created by Walter Murphy, a New York City native who studied at the Manhattan School of Music. Murphy put a disco rhythm to the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. In fall of 1976, the record reached the No. 1 spot on Billboard Magazine’s Hot 100 chart of the nation’s most popular records.

But the disco-classical romance was not just a one-night stand. For it was this week back in 1982 that a disco single featuring famous themes by a dozen classical composers reached its pop chart zenith in the No. 10 position on Billboard’s Hot 100. “Hooked on Classics” was the name of the single and the album. The record had a high-pedigree name on the label — the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the one founded in 1946 by Sir Thomas Beecham. Meanwhile, the man behind “Hooked on Classics” was a British musician named Louis Clark. Clark made the arrangements and conducted the orchestra for the recording. Clark’s musicianship — if not his name — was already well-known in the pop world; he wrote string arrangements for signature recordings by rock group Electric Light Orchestra.

Two more “Hooked on Classics” albums followed. They had success, but neither reached the popularity of the initial album or the first single. However, Clark continued to attach catchy dance beats to great music. In 1997, he used Asian classical works as the basis of a “Hooked on” recording made with the Chinese Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra. More recently, Clark has turned his trick on its head, making orchestral arrangements of pop tunes by artists such as Phil Collins, ABBA and others.

Was “Hooked on Classics” your introduction to classical music? You’re not the only one. It’s time to confess. Use our comments box below.