The root-and-♭5 combination of the min7(♭5) chord (or ♭3-and-6 combination of the min6 chord) produces a “tritone” interval - an unstable and dissonant mixture that desperately craves resolution. This is because the minor-6 chord is actually an inversion of the minor-7-flat-5 (“min7(♭5)”) or half-diminished - a chord that can sound exquisitely heartbreaking in a tension-and-release harmonic passage.
Minor-6 chords have a kind of moody complexity and can sound riveting given the right context.
(Alternatively, we could call it an E♭6(b5) chord - but it’s easier to understand it as a Cmin6 in 1st inversion.) The Cmin6 chord possesses a kind of contemplative dissonance relative to the plain Cmin, and I totally get why Carey and Afanasieff used it here. See Figure 2 below.Ĭarey and Afanasieff used an especially tasty flavor of the iv chord in their minor plagal cadence by emphasizing the ♭6 scale degree (making it the bass note) and by adding the note “A” in both the melody and in the harmony, turning it into a Cmin6/E♭. (Irving Berlin’s 1942 classic “White Christmas” is a fitting example.) Decades - perhaps centuries - of hearing this harmonic movement have trained us as listeners to experience this sound as “sentimental” - and it is precisely this characteristic that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” exploits to invoke the feeling of nostalgia. Songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley era used this cadence regularly to summon a wistful feeling, as the bittersweet ♭6 scale degree yearns to resolve down to the comforting 5th scale degree. Notably, this cadence provides an example of what we call “modal interchange,” where we borrow a chord from the parallel minor scale: C minor is the “iv” chord in the key of G minor. The movement from the notes E to E♭ to D creates a chromatic line for smooth voice leading, as lowering the 6th scale degree to the ♭6 brings it closer to the 5th scale degree resolution note through a process called “chromatic intensification,” imbuing it with a stronger sense of pull. One particularly poignant way to execute this maneuver is with a IV-iv-I resolution (i.e., Major IV to minor iv to I). It’s a more gentle-sounding cadence, and you can hear a great example of it in the Beatles’ “Yesterday” (the two chords that finish the line, “Oh, I believe in yesterday”).Ī variation of the IV-to-I plagal cadence is the “minor plagal cadence,” which engages the minor iv chord to resolve to the I chord. In European classical music, the most common resolution is the “authentic” V-to-I cadence (listen to almost anything by Mozart or Haydn.) Another kind of cadence, the “plagal” cadence (sometimes called the “amen cadence” due to its frequent setting to the text “amen” in church hymns) is a IV-to-I resolution.
We use the term “cadence” to describe how a musical phrase resolves. The harmony in “All I Want For Christmas” invokes the main ingredient that makes those Christmas standards “feel” like Christmas: nostalgia. These elements are steeped in 1940s jazz vocabulary and 19th Century European Romanticism, so they subtly conjure a bygone era. Instead, they employed compositional elements of classic songs from the mid-20th Century - elements we rarely hear in the pop music written during the last three decades, Christmas or otherwise. When writing “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey and her collaborator, Walter Afanasieff, did something unusual: They eschewed the prevailing impulse to restrict the song’s architecture to simple triads (three-note chords) and diatonic melodies (using only notes from the song’s key signature) - which are the basic building blocks of most modern pop music.
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