In one scene in Eat, Pray, Love, the tedious movie based on the bestselling book by Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Roberts – who plays Gilbert – is greedily scarfing up a plate of pasta in Rome. As the camera takes in her relishing the dish, on the soundtrack is "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" ("Hell's vengeance boils in my heart"), the second aria sung by the Queen of the Night in Mozart's great opera, The Magic Flute.

First you think – that's the Queen of the Night aria. Then you think: What the…? Why is this music about vengeance and fury being played while Julia Roberts's character is savoring a delicious-looking bowl of pasta? All right, she's been a bit of an angry sad-sack up to now in the movie – but this?

It shows the wrongheaded approach to opera that movies can take (this one was directed by Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee, the popular television series that features performances of pop songs; he probably knows those songs better than he does opera).

Didn't anyone bother to read the lyrics to this aria before suggesting its use here? Sure the music is visceral and thrilling – maybe like pasta to a delusional foodie type – but certainly someone who was responsible for finding music to accompany the scenes could have found an aria, maybe even an Italian one – that was about joy and rapture rather than murderous rage.

I remember how well director John Schlesinger employed a performance of Mozart's sublime "Soave sia il vento" (May the wind be gentle) from Cosi fan tutte in his 1971 film, "Sunday Bloody Sunday," about a young bisexual designer and his relationships with a female executive recruiter and a male doctor. Ah yes, a trio about love and longing and whether one has made the right choice – in a film about love and longing among three people. Perfect. Perfectly matched.

Think of how in his 1981 film Gallipoli, Peter Weir employed "Au Fond Du Temple Saint," from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, signifying the loss of young men during World War I. Haunting, if a tad obvious. In Tony Scott's risible but enjoyably campy The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie as vampires, Scott used "Viens, Malika," from Delibes' Lakme, and even called attention to it in the scene (Deneuve and Sarandon's charactera discuss whether Lakme and Malika were lovers). The delirious and yes beautiful and risible aria is perfect for the high-toned camp of this film, with its fashion-magazine lesbianism and vampirism. Puccini's "Un bel di vedremo," the Madame Butterfly aria that Adrian Lynne used in his 1988 Fatal Attraction suited to a sharpened  T this twisted thriller of an affair gone awry.

And then there's Francis Ford Coppola's use of "The Ride of the Valkyries" from Wagner's Die Walküre, with the music swelling as planes begin to drop bombs over Vietnam – a sequence that should have seemed too much, too obvious but was, instead, hilarious and horrifying.

But I started with an example of how the wrong use of an opera aria can pretty much take you out of a movie (good or bad). There are plenty of other instances than the rather dreadful Eat, Pray, Love. They can wait until the my next column. If you have suggestions – let me know. There's nothing an opera fan loves more than opera used wrong. 

Programming is everything in a concert.

Not only does it affect the flow of the listening experience – it's better to build to a big finale rather than start with, say, the 1812 Overture – but it affects how an audience listens to and ultimately responds to pieces it hears.

This came to mind when I attended a terrific concert devoted to Bach and polyphonies, featuring old and new music, programmed by pianist-conductor Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

The concert, part of Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, featured the mixed chorus Ars Nova Copenhagen, conducted by Paul Hillier, which sang the Bach, as well as works by Gyorgy Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, and the male Ensemble Basiani from the Republic of Georgia, which sang Georgian polyphonic works based on ancient folk music and other traditional sources.

The concert began with Bach's magnificent motet, "Jesu, Meine Freude," which is a complex piece of vocal layering. When you hear this kind of music, and watch it being performed, you are drawn not only to its dynamics, but to the way the music plays on the faces of the singers, as it were, as it's passed among them, underscored by them: the composer's wishes in action.

Following the baroque splendor of the Bach, the Georgian singers – attired in traditional black costume – sang their close harmonies, which were eerie and exhilarating. The harmonics seemed strange in the way certain ancient folk music does because the modalities are not that familiar to western ears. At least, not as familiar as Bach's.

But this singing – fervent and serious and yet filled with a contained joy – prepared us for Ligeti's 1960s Lux Aeterna, which some may have remembered from the movie 2001, but which here, in its "pure" form, with the only visuals those of the Danish singers arranged in a semicircle at the back of the stage, had the power of a focused flame. The strong dissonance of much modern music is easy to overlook, in a way, when it's merely heard: so often the modern ear relegates it to the mind's "movie music" bin. But to watch the singers (again, to see how the music is passed from one to the other), and to hear it after the Georgian music, made me realize how its strangeness was only the strangeness of unfamiliarity. Ligeti's work wasn't all that different from certain strains of ancient folk music.

Similarly, in the second half of the program, after a ravishing set from the Georgian singers (including a haunting hushed ballad to oxen, which was in effect a meditation on slavery) that ended with wordless vocal music, I realized how we had been prepared to hear the Xenakis, after some 40 or so minutes with the Georgian folk singers.

Although the Xenakis Nuits required that the singers carry tuning forks to keep on pitch, the music, defiantly difficult and harsh, was in a way a natural contemporary outgrowth of the ancient strains. It wasn't that far a leap from the yodeling of the Georgians in one of their pieces to the caterwauling of the singers in the Xenakis. And I don't know if the Xenakis would have made as much sense to us without benefit of the Georgian folk singers (or the Bach that began the program), which showed us the diversity of sounds the human voice can make in the name of expression. But I – and, I assume, the audience – had to be led there by the programming and the sequence of works. With concerts and programming like this, I'm happy to be led.

I've been listening to a new recording of Jennifer Higdon's violin concerto, played by Hilary Hahn, for whom the work was written. It led me to think about the whole commissioning process with music (and sometimes with the visual arts). Why is that music gets commissioned, and that writing generally is left to flounder about on its own?

Imagine if writers were commissioned to write their next work. Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid. But that was then, and even in the Roman era this was a bit of a rare occurrence (Horace turned down state commissions). Today, writers of prose (and poetry), apart from the occasional grant, are unsupported (which is why so many work in academia, where there is steady pay and health benefit).

Composers today aren't exactly rolling in dough. But how is it that it's acceptable for a symphony, an opera house, a patron, to commission a musical piece, while it's considered selling out for writers to accept money for a commissioned work? (In Fay Weldon's The Bulgari Connection, the author mentioned the jeweler's name a dozen times, in exchange for about $25,000; it was front-page news.)

Visual artists too fight against the taint of commissioning. This year on Broadway, the Tony-winning play Red examined Mark Rothko's turning down of a commission from the Four Seasons restaurant in the late 1950s, after he decided that the way the works would be displayed there was nothing like what he had envisioned. He considered it a violation of artistic principles, according to the play, to compromise on how his works were hung.

But what of composers? Why are commissions so necessary to the process today? Surely creative drive is not contingent upon the money that comes from commissions.

I think that for music, commissioning ensures that a work will be heard. At least once. If a symphony orchestra, or an opera house, commissions something, chances are very good that an audience will at least get to experience the work in concert. And, if a work is written for a popular musician with a recording contract, there's a good chance that the composer's work will end up preserved on disk (or digitally).

But prose, and poetry, need to be published (though self-publishing is a viable option today), and to thrive (and for a writer to become established) the works need to be read. Yet writers, unless they're already established and with a publishing contract, have to hope for the best as they labor over their books, or their screenplays or their theater works.

Certainly many composers write without a hint of money at hand. It's usually only the best-known composers (and few if any today are household names) who receive commissions from major cultural institutions. But it's a curious double standard that permits one art form to accept money to create something, while certain others receive money generally after the work is done.

Oh, well. Life isn't fair. And neither is art.