Ancient Music

Ancient music is somewhat of a mystery. While several ancient civilizations had some form of musical notation, interpretation of that notation is up for debate. Music and dance is often reconstructed from artwork depicting musicians and dancers, instruments found in burial sites, or existing traditional music of the area. However, this uncertainty hasn’t stopped our music classes from enjoying explorations of what music may have sounded like in ancient times.

K – 2 students have been experiencing Pharaonic (Ancient Egyptian) music and dance through the story of Hatshepsut – one of the most successful pharaohs, who also happened to be female. Students especially enjoyed imagining how Pharonic dances may have been choreographed. Egyptian choreographers named their “moves” with evocative titles such as: “the successful capture of the boat," “the calf,” "the leading along of an animal," and "the taking of gold.”

3rd – 4th grade students have been recreating music from Native American traditions – singing traditional melodies using wordless vocalizations (also known as non-lexical vocables) and choosing appropriate accompaniment instruments, including drums, sticks, rattles, and bells. It seems the more these students get to bang on drums, the happier they are.

Finally, 5th - 8th graders have, of course, been working with ancient music in the context of their upcoming production of Gilgamesh. Scholars believe Mesopotamian music was based on the diatonic scale (like our major and minor scales), based on pipes found in archaeological digs. However, we have been using a slightly different arrangement of the diatonic scale than what our modern ears are used to – such as the Phrygian mode – to set an otherworldly, ancient mood in our music. Students were enamored of Phrygian music, calling it “spooky” and “sad.” Who knows, Sumerians may have loved this mode as well!

6th – 8th graders have been exploring this music in the context of creating the proper mood for a scene. They first analyzed how Edvard Grieg used different musical properties to set a mood in his own music for a play, Peer Gynt. Students loved the excitement built in The Hall of the Mountain King and are working to use similar techniques to set musical moods for battle and funeral scenes.