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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). 

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