Albert William Ketèlbey (/kəˈtɛlbi/; born Ketelbey; 9 August 1875 – 26 November 1959) was an English composer, conductor and pianist, best known for his short pieces of light orchestral music.

One of his earliest works in the genre, In a Monastery Garden (1915), sold over a million copies and brought him to widespread notice; his later musical depictions of exotic scenes caught the public imagination and established his fortune.

Such works as In a Persian Market (1920), In a Chinese Temple Garden (1923), and In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931) became best-sellers in print and on records; by the late 1920s he was Britain's first millionaire composer.

Ketèlbey's popularity began to wane during the Second World War and his originality also declined; many of his post-war works were re-workings of older pieces and he increasingly found his music ignored by the BBC.

On the last night of the 2009 Proms season the orchestra performed his In a Monastery Garden, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ketèlbey's death—the first time his music had been included in the festival's finale.

[1][6] Ketèlbey competed for a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London, and received the highest marks of all entrants; the future composer Gustav Holst came second.

[11][n 5] In 1896 Ketèlbey took up the post of conductor for a travelling light opera company; his father, who wanted his son to be a composer of serious music, disapproved of what he saw as a lightweight role.

[22][23] In the early to mid-1910s Ketèlbey began to write music for silent films—a new growth industry in Britain from 1910 onwards—and he had great success in the medium until the advent of talking films in the late 1920s.

[32] The musicologist Jonathan Bellman, calling In a Persian Market "immortal", describes it as "an 'intermezzo scene' for band or small orchestra; reprehensibly demeaning or delightfully tacky".

[33] The work was not without its critics; the composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky quotes the view of a Russian journal that "the suite ... had its 'immaculate conception' in imperialistic colonial England.

The composer's intention is to convince the listener that all's well in the colonies where beautiful women and exotic fruits mature together, where beggars and rulers are friends, where there are no imperialists, no restive proletarians.

"[34][n 11] In The Musical Times, the pseudonymous reviewer "Ariel" described the work as "naive and inexpensive pseudo-orientalism",[35] which led to heated correspondence in the journal over the following months between the composer and the critic.

[36] In 1921 Ketèlbey moved from his home in St John's Wood, where he had been living for the previous seven years, to Frognal, an area of Hampstead, north west London.

[1][37] He produced a series of orchestral pieces in the first half of the 1920s, including Bells Across the Meadows released in 1921,[n 12] and Suite Romantique (1922), which the music critic Tim McDonald considers "impressive".

[40] The last of these contained the finale " 'Appy 'Ampstead",[1] which the writers Lewis and Susan Foreman describe as "... a kaleidoscope of passing images, mouth organs, a cornet playing, ... a band, ... shouts of a showman ... with his rattle and a steam engine and roundabout".

[45] Such was Ketèlbey's popularity that by 1924 his works could be heard several times a day in restaurants and cinemas,[46] and in that year the Lyons tea shops spent £150,000 on playing his music in their outlets.

[53] His works continued to sell well, and in the October 1929 issue of the Performing Right Gazette his publisher described him as "Britain's greatest living composer"; when the advertisement was mentioned in The Musical Times, the anonymous writer wrote "we sympathise with Mr Ketèlbey in being thus raised to a pinnacle which he himself, we are sure, would be very far from claiming.

[73] In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Phillip Scowcroft writes, "His gifts for melody and sensitive, colourful scoring ensured continuing popularity with light orchestras and bands until after 1945.

[76] For the chamber repertoire, Ketèlbey composed a string quartet (c. 1896) and a quintet for piano and wind (1896) which won the Costa Prize and the College Gold Medal.

[13] For the familiar orchestral version of the second of these pieces the composer published a synopsis: The first theme represents a poet's reverie in the quietude of the monastery garden amidst beautiful surroundings—the calm serene atmosphere—the leafy trees and the singing birds.

[84] In 1958, the critic Ronald Ever wrote that Ketèlbey was noted for his use of "every exotic noisemaker known to man—chimes, orchestra bells, gongs (all sizes and nationalities), cymbals, woodblocks, xylophone, drums of every variety".

"[86] Among Ketèlbey's light orchestral works with a wholly British flavour is Bells Across the Meadows (1921), redolent, in the words of McDonald, of "rose-entwined thatched cottages standing amidst gardens full of hollyhocks with a gentle brook bubbling on its rustic way and cows grazing peacefully in the pastures beyond".

[39] Urban life was evoked in the five-movement Cockney Suite (1924), described by The Times as "character pieces complete with leering saxophone, cheeky mouth-organ, and some infernally catchy tunes".

[87] Ketèlbey depicts successively a royal procession from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament; an East End pub, with a main theme based on the Cockney ditty "'Arf a pint of mild and bitter"; a waltz at a palais de danse; a sombre glimpse of the Cenotaph in Whitehall; and in the finale, "'Appy 'Ampstead", a picture of the August Bank Holiday fair on Hampstead Heath.

[39] Much of the music Ketèlbey wrote as accompaniment to silent films between 1915 and 1929, though lucrative at the time, has proved ephemeral, although he reused and rearranged some of it in solo pieces for amateur pianists.

[13] The piano works include the early classical pieces such as the 1888 Sonata, and shorter items in a more popular style, such as Rêverie (1894) and Les pèlerins (1925), by way of A Romantic Melody (1898), Pensées joyeuses (1888), In the Woodlands (1921), A Song of Summer (1922), and Légende triste (1923).

Much of the piano music published in the years after the First World War was aimed at a domestic audience; it requires only a modest technical proficiency to play and is simple in structure with deft harmonies.

McCanna comments that not only the title but the material is reminiscent of Rachmaninoff: "the music turns out to copy some of the more illustrious composer's features, notably the final fortissimo statement of the melody in the bass".

[1]During his tenure at Columbia, Ketèlbey promoted the works of several composers, including Haydn Wood, Charles Ancliffe, Ivor Novello, James W. Tate and Kenneth J. Alford, helping to increase the popularity of British light music.

[93] Ronnie Ronalde made In a Monastery Garden his signature tune from 1958,[94] while Serge Gainsbourg used the theme of In a Persian Market for his 1977 song "My Lady Héroïne".