"Our Overture to this issue of the world of music (new series) highlights the extraor dinary developments in the musical life of the Sultanate of Oman, a country that in 2012 celebrated its 42nd "National Day." While the country is steeped in overlapping histories of trade and travel that are centuries old and involve innumerable players and scenes, modern musical developments in Oman may be attributed to His Maj esty Sultan Qaboos bin Sa'id, a phenomenon that is both singular in the contempo rary world and of particular interest to ethnomusicologists and scholars of music and culture. While such developments have been reported by previous publications, our work collectively interprets the events, institutions, and policies of Omani music culture in light of the theoretical interests and paradigms that concern the contempo rary student and scholar. Rapid and multi-faceted musical development, itself partly "natural" but also partly a result of "cultural management" produces a variety of dynamic processes and tensions that reflect, refract, predict, and narrate discourses of class and race, gender and sexuality, origin and identity, regionalism and multi nationalism, and global cultural flows. The Overture also provides a frame for the following articles in the volume that foreground historical perspectives and process es at work in the Arabian Gulf (Ulaby), local, national, and trans-regional systems of musical patronage and production (Rasmussen) and Afro-Omani musics and identity politics (Al-Harthy). We suggest some of the ways in which Oman is a laboratory for the issues and processes that are at the heart of the anthropology of music."