A-flat minor
Minor key with seven flats; relative minor of C-flat major, enharmonically equivalent to G-sharp minor.
What it means
A-flat minor is the minor key built on the tonic A♭. Its natural minor scale consists of the notes A♭, B♭, C♭, D♭, E♭, F♭, G♭, A♭, and carries seven flats as its key signature — every natural note lowered. In harmonic minor, the seventh degree, G♭, is additionally raised to the leading tone G.
The relative major of A-flat minor, sharing the same seven flats, is C-flat major. Enharmonically, A-flat minor corresponds to G-sharp minor, which is written with five sharps and, thanks to its simpler notation, appears far more often in practice.
In the notation
The key signature of A-flat minor consists of seven flats in the order B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, G♭, C♭, F♭, making it one of the most heavily signed keys in use. In practice it is therefore rarely chosen as the home key of an entire piece; it appears more often in its enharmonic guise as G-sharp minor, or only briefly within a work, for example as the goal of a modulation.
Musical use
Because of its cumbersome notation, composers writing longer passages usually turn to the enharmonically identical but visually simpler key of G-sharp minor. A-flat minor itself tends to appear only briefly, for instance as a passing key within chromatic writing or as a particularly dark-colored effect within a few measures.
A-flat minor is distinguished from its relative major, C-flat major, which shares the same pitch collection but centers on C-flat, and from its sonically identical but notationally simpler equivalent, G-sharp minor, indistinguishable from it on modern equal-tempered instruments.
Performance practice
When reading a passage notated in A-flat minor, it can help to mentally reinterpret it as G-sharp minor to get a quicker sense of the actual pitches involved. With seven flats to track, it also helps to first learn the plain natural-minor scale before practicing the harmonic form with its raised seventh degree.