Home

FREE Sample Materials

About Musical Contexts

Subscribe to Musical Contexts

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)/Help

Feedback

Primary/Key Stage 2 Music Resources Index

Secondary/Key Stage 3

Music Resources Index

Contact Musical Contexts

Year 7 Baseline Assessment

2016 GCSE (9-1) Music

Resources Index

Music Cover Bank

Songs and Performing Arrangements Bank

Music Starters

and “DOITNOW’s” Bank

Musical Contexts Shop &

Seasonal Topic Packs

Ancient Greece from Musical Contexts provides a range of fun and exciting music activities and learning opportunities combining singing, performing, composing and listening and appraising with all of the resources you’ll need in one place!  Ideal for non-specialist music teachers (with a wealth of supporting media files to model tasks and a detailed scheme of work and lesson plans) and a wealth of fresh inspiration for music specialists. 

Whether you’re exploring the popular primary history topic of Ancient Greece or The Greeks, there’s something within this unit that will hopefully inspire both you as a teacher and your pupils, there’s something within this unit that will hopefully inspire both you as a teacher and your pupils.  his unit contains a variety of ideas suitable for KS2 classes that wish to link their music with the history unit based on Ancient Greece.  The activities all have a clear music focus and draw upon a history element as a starting point or stimulus.  Like the Primary/Key Stage 2 Unit - “Ancient Egypt”, this unit does not attempt to explore music of the time, since at KS2 level, the historian would be relying heavily on supposition based upon wall paintings, artefacts and such like to ascertain what the music may or may not have sounded like!  Rather, the activities open up opportunities for the creation of pupil’s own music as a response to some of the stimuli associated with Ancient Greece. 

The unit begins with an exploration into triple time - inspired by the three prongs on Poseidon’s trident.  Pupils use the repeating sequence of the border from a Greek plate to perform and compose rhythms in triple metre.  Pupils then move onto explore the Pentatonic Scale (made up of two Greek words in itself! - “pente” (five) and “tonic” (tone)), creating and performing pentatonic melodies, again using the border pattern of a Greek plate to structure their pieces.  Pupils then move onto explore the leitmotif, used to represent a certain character.  Using the features, attributes, associations and characteristics of various Greek gods and goddesses, pupils create their own leitmotifs to represent these through music and sound.  Finally, pupils explore the Greek myth of “Perseus and Medusa”.  Firstly, pupils hold a class competition to create a leitmotif for the hero, Perseus, using the Pentatonic Scale and Triple Time.  Next, they create leitmotifs for other characters within the myth and sound effects for different situations, while the “winning Perseus leitmotif” group adapt their leitmotif to respond to the different situations the hero finds himself in.  This culminates in a class performance – a narrated tale with leitmotifs and sound effects being performed at the appropriate points.  The unit ends with pupils exploring “Greek-inspired” music from a range of different times and places

Learning, Listening, Composing & Evaluating Activities

Starter & Plenary Activities

Performing Activities - Songs & Scores

Please feel free to copy, modify, customise, personalise and use Musical Contexts resources for your own use, with your students and pupils, within your own school or college and on internal Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). 

​Please use the resources responsibly and ethically, as continued irresponsible free sharing and poaching of paid published resources (particularly “free sharing” to Facebook groups and the current trend of setting up “free” music resource websites using Musical Contexts and other published resources) is not only a breach of copyright, but the implications of making these publicly available on websites, even if only for a short period of time, are that other schools and teachers can freely access them meaning a loss of earnings for authors and publishers, jeopardising future resource development for YOUR subject specification and will only sadly see the demise of sites such as Musical Contexts which rely on the support (and honesty) of schools and teachers for future development. 

Musical Contexts is unitedly working with a range of publishers together to monitor Facebook groups for such “free sharing” and regular checks to the web are made using a program which scours the web for PDFs using automated code (scrapers).  Any subscriber found freely sharing Musical Contexts resources online will have their log-in cancelled with immediate effect and no refund given in respect of this.