Among his better-known compositions are settings of Salt-Water Ballads by the poet John Masefield, including "Trade Winds", the popularity of which has given Keel a reputation for being a "one-song composer".
[1][3] While in Munich that Keel became fascinated by folk music, an interest which blossomed on his return to England where he was able to meet fellow enthusiasts such as Lucy Broadwood, J A Fuller Maitland and, eventually, Cecil Sharp.
[3] By contrast, Keel's fieldwork was not particularly extensive: apart from noting down a couple of London street cries[6] his collecting activity seems to have been largely confined to a clutch of folk songs from Hindhead and Haslemere in Surrey,[7] identified and notated in 1913 with the collaboration of fellow society members Clive Carey and Iolo Williams.
His initiative was to be roundly criticised by fellow art song composer and early music enthusiast Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), who deplored Keel's use of the piano and disregard for the original tablature.
[1] Seven arrangements by Keel were later selected for inclusion in a musical play by Hilda Wilson entitled Nymphs and Shepherds (published 1930), which showcased some contemporary settings of Elizabethan and Jacobean songs.
[13] This 60 page booklet was privately printed in a limited edition in 1914 by the Sette of Odd Volumes, an elite bibliophile dining club dedicated to mutual admiration, of which he would later become President ("His Oddship").
Keel himself was arrested and became one of several notable musicians detained at the Ruhleben internment camp near Berlin, where he immediately found himself sharing barracks with fellow composer and RAM colleague Benjamin Dale.
[17] The two later jointly sent an open letter to Alexander Mackenzie, Principal of the RAM, listing forty-two of the musicians detained there and outlining musical activities in Ruhleben at the time, including educational programmes for fellow prisoners.
[21] Privately printed for the Sette of Odd Volumes, it provides a sketch of how this sizeable community of civilian prisoners, who had been crammed into wet and dirty stables, eventually came to organise their own "University" facilities.
[20][22][n 4] After the Ruhleben experience, Keel no longer held recitals but he did continue in his role as a Professor of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music, a post which he had taken up before the war and retained until his eventual retirement in 1939.
In addition to several other Masefield settings from Salt-Water Ballads and elsewhere, Keel wrote songs to words by various British poets, including Shakespeare, de la Mare, Hardy and Tennyson.