Reflections on Periodization: Contributions to a Cultural History of Madeira

Abstract

In two recent research projects – a 2018 entry on music for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Madeira and a larger monograph, from 2021, on the History of Music of Madeira – I was confronted with the problem of writing a history of a rather extended temporal period: six centuries of musical activity in a given geographical space, the archipelago of Madeira.
I then struggled with a concept, periodization, which had only a small role in my previous studies, where the longest period I had researched in a monograph was about a century.
I then understood better Vitorino Magalhães Godinho when he stated that it was not «possible to settle without arbitrariness a division of the history of Portugal into periods» and that this «division into periods cannot be translated into precise dates».
Faced with this problem of periodization, I resorted in the two above-mentioned projects to the proposal of the philosopher Karl Popper, inspired by the historian Lord Acton, that historians should study problems rather than periods.
I then tried to structure the six centuries of music history in Madeira in several ways, trying, in a kind of trial and error and in a to-and-fro between research and writing, to define the main parts of the six centuries under study, around remarkable problems or technologies that triggered changes of great impact on Madeiran society and whose influence would last for long periods of time.
The synthesis of all available information was complex and it would have been possible to structure the periodization in another way in both research projects. This synthesis is embodied in the periodization that I present in this article, which is only one proposal, among other possible ones, of exposition of facts and works that constitute the history of regional music and the contexts that characterized it, throughout six centuries.

Keywords

Periodization; History of Madeira; Music.