Although known since ancient times for its agricultural fecundity, seafaring ingenuity, and maritime trade around the Indian Ocean, Oman’s national narrative is remarkably “presentist:” a miraculous emergence from the dark ages and entrance onto the world stage that is focused on the personage of its visionary leader Sultan Qaboos bin Said. Due to the personal taste of the Sultan, the consistent acquisition of musical capital has been a strategy for nation building that is unique among Arabian Gulf countries where high-rise construction and the plastic arts are more common symbols of modernity and oil wealth. This article unpacks ethnographic research in 2010-2011 among cultural activists and reformers who are using music as a generative force toward the development of collective identities in a geopolitical space. I analyze three domains of cultural production and consider how the Sultan’s initiatives have resulted in the embodiment of artistic consumption and connoisseurship that are required for musical life in the public sphere: first are the Sultan’s privately controlled military bands, Arab music ensembles, and symphony orchestra; second are public arts festivals that nurture and celebrate traditional music and dance; third is the domain of Omani popular music facilitated by Arab regional interculturalism and media flows that depend significantly on practitioners from Egypt, Iraq, and other Gulf states. I show how these domains of music and dance work to enable the imagination of a cultural space and time for Oman and its historical and contemporary relationships with the Arab world, Africa, Asia, and the West. The ethnographic focus on the Salalah Festival in the Dhofar province, provides a close-up shot of the workings of the state at the local level in a context that is both far from the control of the capitol city, Muscat, but that also reproduces many of the relations of dominance and resistance that is an inevitable artifact of political power and cultural policy.