A-flat minor

A♭ minor

Relative key	C♭ major enharmonic: B major
Parallel key	A♭ major
Dominant key	E♭ minor
Subdominant	D♭ minor enharmonic: C♯ minor
Enharmonic	G♯ minor
Component pitches
A♭, B♭, C♭, D♭, E♭, F♭, G♭, A♭

A-flat minor is a minor scale based on A-flat, consisting of the pitches A♭, B♭, C♭, D♭, E♭, F♭, and G♭. For the harmonic minor, the G♭ is raised to G♮. Its key signature has seven flats (see below: Scales and keys).

Its relative major is C-flat major (or, enharmonically, B major), and its parallel major is A-flat major. Its direct enharmonic equivalent is G-sharp minor.

Changes needed for the melodic and harmonic versions of the scale are written in with accidentals as necessary.

Although A-flat minor occurs in modulation in works in other keys, it is only rarely used as the principal key of a piece of music. Some well-known uses of the key in classical and romantic piano music include:

• The Funeral March in Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 12, Op. 26.
• An early section of the last movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 31, Op. 110 (although the key signature of this section uses only 6 flats, not 7).
• The Adagio of Friedrich Kalkbrenner's Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 127, although it is written with a four-flat key signature and uses accidentals to indicate the minor mode.
• The first piece "Aime-moi" ("Love me") from Charles-Valentin Alkan's Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique
• Johannes Brahms's Fugue for organ (c. 1857).
• Max Bruch's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, Op. 88a (although at least one two-piano transcription of this uses a 6-flat signature, similarly to the Op. 110 Beethoven example).
• The Evocación from Book I of Isaac Albéniz's Iberia.
• Leoš Janáček uses it for his Violin Sonata and the organ solo of his Glagolitic Mass.
• The opening of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird.
• Moritz Moszkowski used it for his piano etude, Op. 72 No. 13.
• Franz Liszt's original version of "La campanella" from Grandes études de Paganini, which was subsequently rewritten in G-sharp minor.
• In Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony, there is a particularly aggressive restatement of the introduction of the third movement in A-flat minor.^[1]

It is also used in Frederick Loewe's score to the 1956 musical play My Fair Lady; the Second Servants' Chorus is set in A-flat minor (the preceding and following choruses being a semitone lower and higher respectively).

More often, pieces in a minor mode that have A-flat's pitch as tonic are notated in the enharmonic key, G-sharp minor, because of G-sharp's appreciably simpler key signature and it has just five sharps as opposed to the seven flats of A-flat minor. As a result, only works expressly notated as such may reasonably be considered to be in A-flat minor.

In some scores, the A♭ minor key signature in the bass clef is written with the flat for the F on the second line from the top.^{[nb 1]}

Scales and keys

Notes

1. An example of this is the bass clef staff of the harp parts in the Jupiter movement of Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets.^[2]

References

1. Mahler, Gustav. Symphony No. 9 in Full Score, Dover, ISBN 0-486-27492-6 (1993), pp. 116-119.
2. Holst, Gustav. The Planets in Full Score, Dover, ISBN 0-486-29277-0 (1996), p. 109.

External links

• Overview of Compositions with 7 Accidentals