Romantic Music Traits and Evolved Agricultural Landscapes
Characteristics of Romanticism in Music
Romantic music possesses several key characteristics:
- Music is a means of escape for humans. Romanticism emerged after the failed revolutions, offering a way to flee reality.
- It’s a mode of expressing feelings.
- It’s a preferred means to enter an imaginary world.
- It’s a vehicle for transmitting everything subjective.
- Unlike Classicism, the focus is more on form than content.
- There’s a freedom of form, with a predominance of fantasy.
- It features lyrical exaggeration of sentiment, rich modulations, harmonies, intense chromaticism, and the use of dissonance.
- The texture is complex and dense, making orchestration challenging.
- There’s significant development, especially in wind instruments.
- There’s a richness and variety in piano pieces, moving away from the classical form.
- Composers seek unity in the work through new systems like the idée fixe or the leitmotif, a musical theme that repeats cyclically.
- There’s a pursuit of virtuosity.
- National musical styles emerge.
- Beethoven, following in the footsteps of many musicians of this era, expressed himself through the symphony.
Evolved Agricultural Landscapes
Evolved agricultural landscapes are characterized by these features:
- They are unique spaces with a high level of development.
- Advanced technology is used.
- Labor productivity is high.
- Agricultural production is specialized and market-oriented. Production is commercialized and specialized in products most appropriate for the physical environment.
- Land is privately owned, sometimes by individuals, and sometimes by corporations or multinationals.
Agriculture in New Countries
Agriculture in “new countries” presents these characteristics:
- Regular, large plots.
- Technological works with high and low manpower.
- In wetter grassland areas, agriculture dominates. In the U.S., specialized belts are formed, extensively cultivating one type of product (intensive or mixed).
- In the driest areas, from the steppes of Argentina’s Pampas to the U.S. and Australia, cattle and sheep ranching dominate.
- Production is geared towards mass-oriented, specialized products, aiming for the lowest possible price to sell on the international market. This is an example of speculative agriculture.
Clear farming is based on monoculture, mass production, and marketing in the international market, with the primary objective of maximizing profits by selling cheap goods.
- Land ownership is in the hands of highly skilled farmers who manage production as entrepreneurs, or large capitalist societies that also control industrial transformation or product marketing.
Problems of Agriculture in New Countries
Problems include overproduction and falling prices, motivated by specialization, and soil depletion due to monoculture.
Plantation Agriculture
Plantation agriculture is localized in areas of humid tropical climate, near the coast.
Traditional plantations, created by the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century, cultivated a few products, such as sugar cane and cotton. The agricultural landscape presents plots worked with a high level of investment and technology, and labor-intensive mass production is cheap. It specializes in products in high demand in developed countries, where they cannot be grown for climatic reasons. It is intended for human consumption or industry. Production is geared towards obtaining products at the lowest possible price to sell in international markets.
The land is in the hands of large multinational companies from developed countries. The problems of plantations include fluctuations in international demand, the emergence of synthetic competitors for some products, and soil depletion due to monoculture.