The secret Christmas chord

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Before the rock ’n’ roll era, popular songs had a lot more in common with jazz. Composers such as Ralph Blane (“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” 1943), Mel Tormé (“The Christmas Song,” commonly known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” 1944), and Jule Styne (“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!,” 1945) all brought the rich harmonic palette of jazz to the pop tunes and Broadway and Hollywood musical numbers that comprise the canon of 1920s-’50s songs qualifying as Great American.

These relatively exotic harmonies—particularly the diminished chords—are often used by more modern songwriters to get a “classic” sound. For instance, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” includes some notes in its choral parts that I think are intended to recall the harmonic vocabulary of those 1940s Christmas standards.

Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” does more than subtly evoke memories of Judy Garland and Nat King Cole’s Christmases gone by. It sounds more like it could have been written in that era and locked in a Brill Building safe that wasn’t cracked again until 1994, when Carey needed a new song for her Christmas album. But it wasn’t, of course. Carey and Afanasieff wrote it themselves.

They count at least 13 distinct chords at work in “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” resulting in a sumptuously chromatic melody. The song also includes what I consider the most Christmassy chord of all—a minor subdominant, or “iv,” chord with an added 6, under the words “underneath the Christmas tree,” among other places. (You might also analyze it as a half-diminished “ii” 7th chord, but either interpretation seems accurate.)

The same chord is found, in a different key and inversion, in Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”—on the line “children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow,” specifically under the word listen, among other spots. In both songs the chord comes immediately after a major subdominant chord, giving the effect of a “bright” major subdominant that you might say “sighs” or “melts” into a “dark” minor subdominant spiked with a “spicy” extra tone (the added 6), before the songs settle back into their tonic, or “home,” chords.

In plain English, it’s a chord sequence that sounds “cozy.” Carey’s song includes lots of other major-to-minor or diminished sequences that make a guy feel like he’s snuggled by the fire, just back from the war, with a mulled cider in one hand and his other arm around Rosie the Riveter, ready to start a baby boom on Christmas Eve 1945.


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