The closing scene of Todd Field’s acclaimed film Tár depicts its disgraced titular character, former principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, now reduced to conducting video game music in an unspecified country in Southeast Asia. The final shot pans across an audience of fans in colorful cosplay, wigs and costumes meant to imitate characters from video games and Japanese animation, or “anime.” In addition to the character’s individual loss of status, this scene highlights the vulnerabilities surrounding orchestral music worldwide: what does it mean when formerly low culture styles begin to encroach on the European orchestral canon’s one-sacrosanct position? Composers of video game music, such as Final Fantasy’s Nobuo Uematsu, and anime, such as frequent Hayao Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi, have in recent years begun conducting orchestra tours of North America and Europe. In this paper, I explore “anime music,” a term widely deployed in anglophone media but with no exact equivalent in Japanese, as a way of approaching the complex relationship between conservatory-style musical training and transnational popular styles in the era of digital streaming. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with members of the Japan Composers and Arrangers Association (JCAA), as well as autoethnographic approaches to my own status as a “failed composer” and compositional training in Japan and the United States, I bring Behar’s (1996) concept of vulnerability into dialogue with Halberstam’s (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, which highlights the possibilities for new insights afforded by moments of ostensible inadequacy or defeat.

Sephardi life-cycle songs, aural narratives of Sephardic cultural identity and practice, are a deeply endangered musical practice. The majority of these songs were created and widely performed during the heyday of Ottoman Sephardic culture. In the world of Sephardi cultural and linguistic revitalization, language and music are inseparably intertwined: this canon of music is one of the few major repositories of Ladino-language vernacular texts. In the contemporary moment, these songs have helped form a bridge between individuals in a Sephardi diaspora rapidly assimilating to various local cultures and an endangered sense of collective cultural memory. Jan Assman and John Czaplicka (1995) note that "The entire Jewish calendar is based on figures of memory. The flow of everyday communications such as festivals, rites, epics, poems, images, etc., form ‘islands of time.’” Because of the wide geographic dispersal of the diaspora, Ladino language classes and other linguistically-centered cultural activities often take place in virtual settings online. I argue that in these spaces there is a new diasporic coming-together which is taking place across time zones, interweaving disparate Sephardi communities in a kind of modern parallel to those of the former Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the life-cycle repertoire plays a part in reclaiming collective memory, and technology affords recontextualization. Nevertheless, the nature of using virtual settings as an antidote to the relative placelessness of modern Sephardi culture highlights the true extent to which this tradition is vulnerable, and how contemporary practitioners are confronting that vulnerability.

“Vodou cannot be learned from a book,” Manbo (Vodou Priestess) Maude firmly asserts while I watch her prepare a ritual for that night’s celebration. This sacred tradition passed through time from elders’ stories thrives on its closed practices to which only few are privy. The Haitian experience has often been portrayed by ethnographers and anthropologists who engaged with communities for a few months or maybe a few years, but what happens when the observer sits at the intersection of outsider and native community member? As academia diversifies its future scholars, autoethnographic approaches have served as one crucial means by which scholars can represent their own communities. However, this often presents a challenge when objectivity is largely described as an empty vessel prepared to be filled with completely new knowledge. If Vodou cannot be learned from a book, how can scholar-practitioners write about, express their knowledge of, and engage in ethnography in a sacred tradition in which they are intimately familiar? Where is the line of knowing drawn as we push against the structures of methodology? How do we know what we know? When do we resist sharing sacred information? Guided by methods of "collective shared humanity" demonstrated by scholar-practitioners Charlene Desir, Celucien L. Joseph, Philippe Martin, and Lewis A. Clormeus (2023), this paper delves into the multifaceted dimensions of vulnerability encountered during ethnographic research as a scholar-practitioner of Haitian Vodou. Ultimately, I argue that vulnerability is the constant dance and struggle to protect what we hold sacred.

The first balalaikas and domras, plucked lutes from the Russian Empire, came to the United States in the early 1900s. Popularized by newly arrived émigrés, these musical instruments spread within the diasporic community, becoming a material and sonic marker of belonging to the Russian imperial cultural heritage. In the current times, marked by a heightened need for reevaluation of Russian culture’s imperial and colonial legacies, how can one vulnerably conduct research with the diasporic community who identifies with the imperial past? Drawing from Ruth Behar’s notion of vulnerability of both the observed and the observer (1996), this paper reflects on my fieldwork and historical research of balalaika and domra players in the United States amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In thinking about my research with heritage musicians whose families emigrated from the different parts of the Russian Empire, including present-day Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, I am attuned to their cultural memories and self-perception. Rather than treating the historical past as a buffer, I contemplate the vulnerability of my interlocutors and their histories, where the vanished empire remains the only cultural home their families had and left behind. I also consider my positionality and emotional involvement with the communities I studied and the tensions that emerged from the academic agenda of my project and the current geopolitical situation. This reflective exploration aims to spark a broader conversation on ways to imbue historical ethnomusicology with the same vulnerability inherent in our participant-observation ethnographic practices.