Integrating Multicultural Children’s Songs into Beginner Sompoton Instruction

Abstract

The sompoton is a traditional bamboo mouth organ of the Kadazan Dusun community in Sabah, East Malaysia, yet it remains underrepresented in formal school music education due to the lack of developmentally sequenced instructional materials for beginner learners. Existing educational practices have largely relied on demonstration-based approaches, with limited pedagogical structuring. Situated within Malaysia’s multicultural education context, this study develops a pedagogical design for beginner sompoton instruction using multicultural children’s songs. Adopting a qualitative research approach, children’s songs from Kadazan Dusun, Rungus, Malay, and Chinese traditions were analysed and selected using a Kodály-based analytical framework, drawing on criteria such as tone set, pitch range, rhythmic patterns, phrase structure, and a comfortable starting pitch. From an initial corpus of 137 songs, 37 were identified as pedagogically suitable and organised into a developmentally sequenced instructional framework. Instructional activities were designed following a singing-to-playing trajectory, informed by core principles of Kodály pedagogy, particularly singing-based preparation and sequential pitch progression. The study proposes a structured yet flexible pedagogical design that supports culturally responsive and developmentally appropriate beginner sompoton instruction.