This book is about music’s work in raising the medieval city of Venice and in founding the empire on which its fortunes would depend. It focuses on a set of musical projects, played out in the twin realms of liturgy and civic ritual, that supported the creation of a Venetian political identity, gave shape to its far-fetched history, and framed and interpreted the city’s unique material culture as it was in the process of taking shape. Though Venice’s musical heyday began later, springing out of its dwindling relevance as an empire, though generations of admirers and detractors have decried it as a spectacle of veneers and artificiality, and though the city itself has been slowly, if beautifully, decomposing for half a millennium, this book begins with a place in need of building.