Over thirty-one years, from her appointment as head of what was then the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Music Department in 1958 until her death in 1989 – including five years at the helm of ACARTE and her highly important work in implementing successive reforms to the country’s art education – Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão’s influence on the performing arts in Portugal was unparalleled. In many ways, her impact can still be felt to this day. From the 1950s to the 1970s, she was responsible for establishing the music infrastructure that enabled Portugal to participate actively, for the first time ever, on the international concert circuit and for creating the foundations of a new music education policy that overcame many of the shortfalls of a music system that modernity had yet to reach. Later, in the 1980s, she would also be responsible for courageously pushing for a post-modern approach to the critical questioning of the established canon, for aesthetic experimentation and innovation in all art fields, for new interdisciplinary projects and languages, for the discovery of non-European arts, and for the dialogue between erudite and popular cultural traditions and expressions.

This colloquium seeks to examine Madalena Perdigão’s myriad contributions, the result of her permanent quest for structural answers to what she saw as the gaps in Portuguese cultural life. It also ends with a challenge: what new solutions, in the direct legacy of her thoughts and actions, are needed for the obstacles facing the arts in Portugal today?