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    The Cello Museum > Articles > Articles > An Orkney Update from Gill Tennant

An Orkney Update from Gill Tennant

9 January 2026
Looking for arrangements of folk music for cello ensembles? Check out this update from Gill Tennant, a cellist, author, arranger, and composer based in Orkney, Scotland.

Editor’s note: Gill has contributed extensively to the Cello Museum’s Cello Birthdays project, was the inspiration for the Ukrainian National Anthem project, and she is also the author of Mellow Cello, a wonderful collection of short stories for cellists.

Additional note from Gill: Please hold off on purchasing my book, Mellow Cello, until the next edition, which will be coming out soon and will have many corrections. Thank you.

Gill Tennant Cello Ensemble Music - Folk Music Arrangements - Duets, Trios, Quartets, and Quintets

I began writing music in my teens when studying composition with Philip Cannon as a Junior exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music. As a cellist I’ve always concentrated on compositions for cellists. As playing has become more difficult with age I have concentrated on writing and arranging music for cellists, with a particular love of the folk music of the three British Celtic nations. After 30 years in England, the majority in London, I spent 40 years in Wales, the mostly teaching cello as a peripatetic teacher with pupils mainly between 4 and 19 years old. We then retired to Orkney, an island off the north
of Scotland, with a rich heritage of folk fiddling.

Gill Tennant

Gill Tennant

In 2021 I began collecting world lullabies for a French member of a cello forum on Facebook, who wanted to make a tape of them for her sister’s baby. This year I compiled the lullabies into two collections for cello ensembles.

The first collection of these I produced, contains songs with duet, trio and quartet arrangements.   I’ve added a grading sheet for parts at the end of each book. The first book has parts ranging from beginner to approximately Grade 3 to 4 standard (Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM)) in a range of key signatures. Book 1 includes lullabies from England, Wales, Scotland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, America, Poland, and the Philippines as well as a Zulu lullaby and my own arrangement of a lullaby for bass male voice, and another arrangement of the earliest known Akkadian lullaby words, using Mesopotamian musical rules, and an accompaniment mimicking a lyre. Sections of the collection are preceded by the scales of the keys used, and they are arranged as close to difficulty order as I could manage.

Tennant World Lullabies

The second lullaby collection contains songs with duet, trio, quartet and quintet arrangements, and was completed this year. It contains lullabies from Scotland, the Philippines, Japan, Wales, Iceland and an ancient Russian lullaby, also arrangements of two Schubert lullabies, as well as a more complex version of my Akkadian lullaby. The parts in this collection vary from approximately grade 3-4 to Grade 8+ using a wider range of keys, and again each section is  preceded by the keys used in those lullabies. Additionally in this collection each lullaby contains a link to the full lyrics of each song and one to an audio version of the song.

My first book of lullabies is already available with covers designed by my husband Mark. Our CelloStory Etsy store contains about 20 collections either for cello, or in some cases cello and voice, and more will be added shortly. I’d welcome feedback on these songs, tunes and collections.

Here is the link to the CelloStory store, where the cello arrangements are available as downloadable PDFs.

Author

Gill Tennant Author

Born the middle daughter of three, to parents who were superb amateur musicians, Gill began playing the cello at five years old. At ten she was awarded an exhibition to the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music in London, where she studied weekly for 9 years. At that time she was being encouraged to become a professional cellist, but her heart was already in cello teaching- a little of which she'd done since she was 13. She had also taken over as peripatetic cello teacher for the area of London where she was schooled in her final school years. So she fought against going to full-time college and instead trained as a teacher. After some years teaching all ages in Music, English, and general subjects in English schools, she became a peripatetic cello teacher once more in the very rural county of Ceredigion in Wales where her family had moved. She taught pupils from four years old to nineteen in schools and wrote cello tutors for them using the nursery rhymes and folk tunes they were familiar with in this Welsh-speaking area. She also arranged Welsh folk songs for the Junior and intermediate String Orchestras there. After retiring she did some private cello teaching and began writing, too, both words and music. Her collection of illustrated short stories about and for cellists has been published, and the Cello Museum is planning to publish its second edition, plus the audiobook, to which many cellists on Facebook cello forums contributed during the pandemic. Lately, she has turned her hand to producing books of cello tunes, both regional ones, and other themed collections for learners and for cello ensembles.