Is F-flat Major a Key?

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The brass quintet I play in has been looking at the Viktor Ewald quintets, and we were bemused to find this:

It's the opening of the third movement in quintet no. 4, and it's in Fb major - eight flats (that is, seven flats with B double-flat).

Okay, why not E major, then? Well, the rest of the piece is in flat keys; all four of the quintets are in flat keys.

It wouldn't have looked as funky to them as it does to us. Today, the standard instrumentation of a brass quintet is 2 Bb trumpets, F horn, trombone, and tuba (or bass trombone). The trombone and tuba parts are written in concert pitch, so we end up with eight flats in those parts.

In Ewald's day, a brass quintet was a subset of a brass band. The instrumentation in his group was 2 Bb cornets, Eb alto horn, Bb baritone horn, and Bb tuba. The parts were transposed and written in treble clef, as in a brass band. So, the passage above would have looked something like this:

The parts for the Bb instruments are notated in Gb major, and the Eb instrument in Db major - "normal" keys.

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