In “Just Listen,” The Day’s music writers share their playlists of favorite recordings and invite you to share your comments and your playlists. Each blog includes a Spotify links for the music in play. You can stream the music, then add your comments in this blog.

It’s Oscars season, and ever since “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, music has added an extra layer of drama, comedy and nuance to the story telling. For some of us (well, for me), the use of music can make or break a film.

Classical music long has been used and abused in films, but this blog was inspired by the heart-wrenching use of the perfect classical selection in the Best Foreign Language Film nominee “Ida,” directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, perhaps the best 2014 film I’ve seen.

As the final credits roll, we hear pianist Alfred Brendel playing the Busoni transcription of Bach’s chorale “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ,” a hymn of consolation to the main character, Ida. This is music so timeless, so direct and with such deep emotion, it should remind us that Bach all but invented our musical language and that all music after Bach is in his debt:

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The entire three-minute recording can be heard here:

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When directors look to evoke subtle emotions, classical music presents a seemingly endless variety of shades and nuance that words cannot express.

The soundtrack snippets I offer here are not from Disney’s wonderful animations, the “Fantasias,” or from biopics centered on a famous composer, such as the excellent 1984 Mozart drama “Amadeus,” which swept the 1985 Oscars (including Best Picture), or the execrable 1994 “Immortal Beloved,” which proved that a character as complex as Beethoven can’t be confined to a pat and fanciful narrative.

There are many notorious classical snippets on soundtracks, such as the chopper attack powered by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in the 1979 “Apocalypse Now” (eight nominations, two awards) ...

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... or Barber’s Adagio for Strings in the 1986 “Platoon” (seven nominations four awards, including Best Picture), or the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” in the ethereal opening ring scene of “Raging Bull” (eight nominations, two awards).

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A wonderful consequence of the use of classical music in popular films is that film can be a powerful vehicle to introduce the art form to many who have had little exposure to it. I know one World war II buff who heard a Beethoven string quartet used in an emotional scene from “Band of Brothers” and was so moved by it, he bought the complete 16-quartet Beethoven cycle on CD.

Let’s begin by giving a Lifetime Achievement award to Stanley Kubrick, who accompanied all of his most dramatic scenes in his mature work with what we call “classical music.” From the space station spinning to the “Blue Danube Waltz” in the 1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey” (three nominations, one award), to the switched-on Beethoven that is central to his 1971 “A Clockwork Orange” (four nominations), to the spooky Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in his 1980 horror film “The Shining” (zero nomination, the fools!) or to the haunted, dead-inside movement from Ligeti's piano cycle "Musica ricercata" in the 1999 “Eyes Wide Shut,” Kubrik had a genius for picking the right track.

With music like Bartok’s already in hand, why would you look elsewhere for soundtrack material:

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The best proof of Kubrick’s commitment to classical music was his 1975 “Barry Lyndon” (seven nominations, four awards, including Best Music). The film was, in effect, a three-hour long, period piece music video. That it starred a terrible actor (Ryan O’Neal) made no difference – the costumes, the cinematography and the score make it one of the most beautiful films ever. Running through the soundtrack like dual themes is an orchestration of a sarabande movement from Handel’s Harpsichord Suite No. 11 and the haunting slow movement to Schubert’s E Flat Piano Trio. The steady, treading pace of the Schubert carried the film along through periods of little dialog:

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Another lifetime achievement goes to director Terrence Malick, who so often relied on cinematography and musical score to weave emotion, with dialog as a secondary element.

I am one of the devotees of Malick’s polarizing (you love it or hate it) and dreamlike 2011 “Tree of Life” (three nominations and winner of that other major best picture award, the Cannes Palme d’or). It’s an impressionistic musing on life and death starring the stunning camera work of Emmanuel Lubezki and the music of Holst, Gorecki, Berlioz, Schumann, Bach and others. The film time and again captures the exhilarating simple joys of childhood, accompanied by Smetana’s paean to the river that ran through his life, The Moldau.

The Moldau starts at 0:23 and runs to 0:59 in this trailer, musically framed by John Tavener's "Funeral Canticle."

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Malick’s use of soundtrack cues adds insights for those in tune with the score. The Moldau was Czech composer Smetana’s nostalgia tribute to his world’s simple beauty, and that rings true in the director’s use of its naïve, sweeping message.

Another perfect use of music by Malick is the opening scene of his 2006 tale of John Smith and Pocahontas, “The New World” (one nomination), which depicts the English arriving by ship in the Virginia estuaries. The scene plays out over the opening motif to Wagner’s four-opera Ring Cycle, rivulets of sound the composer used to portray the Rhine River. This music cues a strong response from those who recognize it: the aquatic start of a vast, mythic epic … an ideal parallel for the opening of a new world to the English.

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Some hidden gems of films have been made unforgettable to me by perfectly cued musical selections.

John Boorman’s 1981 Arthurian epic “Excalibur” (one nomination) is so rich in imagery that he can be forgiven for using that most hackneyed and overwrought of chest-thumpers, “O Fortuna” from “Carmina Burana.” But the wise Boorman selected the overture to Wagner’s operatic tale of the quest for the Holy Grail, “Parsifal,” in his cinematic depiction of the English version of that legend:

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Now for one final gem, a calm drama conveyed by that most emotional of all composers, Franz Schubert.

One of the finest of all films starring Gérard Depardieu is the 1994 setting of the Balzac story “Colonel Chabert.” Chabert is a soldier returning home to Paris a broken man after 10 years in the Napoleonic wars. His wife, assuming he had died, has remarried and refuses to recognize him at first. He sues to reclaim his wife and his honor, but her new husband is a man of wealth and power, and Chabert is put out to pasture in a sort of 19th century hospice infirmary. As he wanders the dreary landscape, desolate and bereft, the opening section of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Minor is his sole companion. It is played here by Rudolph Serkin:

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This classical fare is a far cry from, say, a gopher dancing to Kenny Loggins’ “I’m Alright” in “Caddyshack,” but these are musical moments that, for me, added tremendous depth of content to these films. I wonder how many of you have a scene from cinema etched in your memory by the ideal musical score.