A-flat minor
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| Relative key | C♭ major | |
|---|---|---|
| Parallel key | A♭ major | |
| Component pitches | ||
| A♭, B♭, C♭, D♭, E♭, F♭, G♭, A♭ | ||
- Also see: A-flat major, or A minor.
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 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)
- 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.
- Moritz Moszkowski used it for his piano etude, opus 72 number 13.
- Punchline of the joke, "What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?"
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. As a result, only works expressly notated as such may reasonably be considered to be in A-flat minor.
One notable piece of popular music in A-flat minor is Walkin' on the Sun by Smash Mouth.
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.
[edit] Scales and keys
| Diatonic Scales and Keys | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The table indicates the number of sharps or flats in each scale. Minor scales are written in lower case. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
