The Melody of the Tides

By

Raymond J. Bishop Jr., Ph.D.

 

         The idea for this article slowly emerged during a class in Energetic Osteopathy taught by Tom Shaver, D.O.1 During the class, Shaver used musical terminology (tone and frequency) to describe the osteopathic "tides" and suggested obliquely that they have an inherent melodic quality. These observations precipitated a tsunami of questions, some of which he later amplified. For instance, Shaver offered this explanation for the tides as musical form: "[The tides] are like a symphony with multiple lines simultaneously harmonizing and doing counterpoint and becoming the melody, seamlessly so that at any point whatever our focus, [it] is on is the melody, but if we can back out and listen without focus and demand for acknowledgment and response, we can not only hear more than one line but start to experience the richness of the multiple lines and their interrelationships and when they are seemingly disparate because of a harmony we have not trained our perception to recognize yet, or we don't have a flexibility in our own system necessary for the perception. Like a judgment or belief which blocks us from receiving the particular input necessary to appreciate the relationships present" (italics mine).2

 

         The goal of this paper is to reframe Shaver's intriguing language, which owes much to Sutherland, into a sequence of ever-clearer connections between the worlds of music and energetic osteopathy. Other central issues, such as different theories of cranial osteopathy, are not discussed here in order to focus on reshaping Shaver's language into a workable metaphor for the "melody of the tides."3 One obvious way to proceed would be to elaborate on this tidal symphony image. However, for reasons that will become clear, the structures of familiar classical and Romantic era symphonies (c.1760-1900) fail completely as models for musical forms as tides.

 

         First, a brief description of the unfolding tides.  The tides are a series of slowly moving inherent movements that can be sensed not only through the craniosacral system but throughout the body.  Shaver described three primary tides (or inherent wave patterns): the CRI (the craniorhythmic impulse), one cycle every 6 seconds; the Mid-Tide, one cycle every 24 seconds; and the Long Tide, one cycle every 96 (or 100) seconds. There are several others including a 15-second tide (commonly found in psychiatric patients), a 48-second tide, and a number of longer tides (one of which crests every 13-14 minutes, with pulsations most easily felt on long road trips). According to Franklyn Sills, who calls the slower tides (which were the focus of Shaver's class) Deeper Tidal Rhythms, the Mid-Tide (or "Fluid Tide") "is [the] level of unfoldment in which the organizing forces of the human system manifest as a direct physiological principle. The Long Tide "is the Original motion which is an expression of the creative intentions of the Breath of Life"5 (a concept originating with Sutherland). Such language reflects the metaphysical ideas of Sutherland and his influential successors Rollin Becker and James Jealous.

         If we were to imagine a musical structure that mimicked the wave patterns in the tides, what would be its essential characteristics? The most obvious element would be horizontality, a linear orientation similar to the sine waves found in the tides. A musical term that evokes this linearity is "melocentricism," a term I have used elsewhere4 that means melody-centered. Since melodies are a linear pattern, that is, since they contain pitches (notes) and durations (rhythmic values), they are an obvious model for the osteopathic tides. Another element Shaver describes is simultaneity. By this I mean that the musical structure must be able to represent several distinct aural patterns at the same time, analogous to the actual state of the tides. The third requisite feature would be  sustained temporality.  That is, the composition would have to last a considerable period of time for wave patterns that occur every several minutes to be felt (or heard) and recognized as distinct recurring melodic patterns. A final, more abstract, feature is the metaphysical Zen-like language that originated with Sutherland and that imbues many of his students' descriptions of the tides.

 

         The first three elements are found in a musical structure called "the overtone series." When an instrument sounds a note, that note is not a single pitch; rather it is a composite of notes simultaneously sounding. These higher notes, or overtones, and the lowest original note (the fundamental) make up a pitch complex, the overtone series. Overtones can also be produced by dividing a vibrating string in various lengths. The first to describe this phenomenon was Pythagoras, of geometry fame. Here is a concise explanation: "The overtones occur because [a] string vibrates in a very particular pattern. There is a wave formed by the whole string - the loudest sound heard. But the string will also vibrate in parts, so long as the parts equal the length of the entire string."6 This pattern of divisions, then, generates the overtones. If we divide the string in half, the first overtone, an octave (A to a is an octave) above the fundamental (or original note), is heard. To get the second overtone, we divide the string in thirds, producing a ratio of 3:2. This ratio creates the second overtone, a fifth above the second (a to e' is a fifth), so the second overtone is e'. On we go with ever smaller ratios. Generally, only the first four or five overtones are audible.

 

         Several practical problems limit this model. The first problem is immediately obvious. Any overtone series generated by striking a pitch on the piano, even a very low one, will have a limited audible duration and fades very rapidly and might last, say, 20 seconds at most. This composite sonority simply cannot provide a sustainable wave pattern. One solution would be to generate a sustained pitch on an instrument like a violin or an organ whose sustainability is limited only by the endurance of the performer. A more felicitous alternative would be to have it electronically generated (as in the composition Stimmung, discussed below).

 

         The second problem is less obvious but equally limiting. We cannot create lower pitches below the fundamental, as its name suggests. To solve this problem we might create a hypothetical "undertone series" in which we increase rather than divide the length of string for each pitch! This inverted pattern would mirror the scheme of the overtone series, requiring ever-redoubled string lengths to generate these lower partials. The first few undertones might look like this: 1st=2 octaves, 2nd= 4 octaves and a 5th, etc. This solution, however, misses a wide number of notes, some of which might serve as matches for actual tidal frequencies. A simpler solution for generating a pitch lower than the fundamental would be to simply transpose it. Transposition is the movement from one pitch or key to another. If you accept that we can transpose several octaves lower and create new overtone series on these theoretical lower pitches, we could eventually generate frequencies that would correspond to all the tides, even those that might take days, months, or years to cycle.

 

         Another practical problem relates to the normal range of human hearing. The lowest note of the piano is A3 and has a vibrational rate of 27.5 herz. The A one octave below it (A4) has a vibrational rate of 18.75. If we accept that average human hearing is 20 herz (vibrations per second) to 20 megaherz (20,000 herz), this low A (A4) will be beyond that range. There is also a technical problem, which we might call a discrepancy in amplitudes. Herz are measured in cycles per second and the tides are measured in seconds per cycle, a magnitude problem of major proportion. This renders any felicitous coincidences in frequency moot.7 Clearly, the overtone series is a less than satisfactory solution, as it is very abstract and fraught with problems. Where then to look for a better model?

 

         But, first, before examining a few other possibilities from the musical field, let us indulge in a "thought journey."8  Perhaps in this way we can "pave the wave" for that metaphysical element missing in the overtone series. Envision yourself in an aluminum geodesic dome. In the dome are reclining chairs and an elaborate sound system. After you adjust yourself comfortably in the chair and close your eyes, the lights are dimmed and your guide tells you that you are about to embark on an extended aural journey. You soon find yourself on a dock by a lake. You can hear the sound of waves lapping quietly below you. Gradually, you recognize patterns in these waves, differences in amplitude, volume and frequency. As you intensify your listening, patterns emerge! These patterns soon become clear, regular and simultaneous.

 

         Then, a new element emerges. A barely audible pulsing sound, carried by the waves, floats across the lake. It sounds like a distant voice slowly arching toward you. As the sound gets closer and clearer, you realize that this is actually a single tone. This tone surrounds you, surging through your being. As you listen more closely, the sustained tone becomes richer, more complex. Gradually, overtones clamor for your attention and you find that there are so many that you cannot take them in all at once. You suspect that the tones are related to the waves, but you are unsure. Your attention is drawn to first one and then another tone, the higher partials (that annoyingly pretentious word for overtones your college roommate Keith was so fond of using!) Remember when you studied this in undergraduate freshman theory at that glorious bastion of music, The New England Conservatory. Enough of this anecdotal peregrination, back to the waves!

 

         Your attention is now repeatedly to a specific pitch. It moves to the foreground as all others gradually recede. It vibrates with a distinct frequency and becomes much louder and more resonant than all the rest. Other overtones beckon you and, for brief periods of time override this fundamental. With consistent effort, you return to that initial pitch and eventually find your way through this aural miasma to the root pitch, that Ur-Tone, the Gaia of all frequencies. Here is where you belong and you settle in, secure in the knowledge that you can relocate this fundamental long after this imaginary journey has ended.

 

         The value of this thought journey is that for the previous several sentences we were able to move from the intellectual to the affective, replacing mathematics with sensation. In the world of the geodesic dome, the logical limitations of herz vs. waves and flawed metaphors evaporate. Logic is replaced by possibility and the overtone series, which proved such an unreliable model for biodynamic tides, takes on a palpable immediacy. Tones and waves converge and distract, the process is fluid and multifarious. In reality, our thought journey's tone and stream-of-consciousness languaging more closely evoke the world of the tides than the abstractions above; suggesting a state of being fully present and in the moment, that implicit quality of the innate knowing so characteristic of working with the mid-tide (or fluid tide).

 

         But, to return to our central question! If the overtone series fails to adequately express this sense of simultaneous tides, and if there is in fact a "melody of the tides," where in music might we look for this parallel? One likely candidate would be medieval plainchant. First, it is melocentric. Think of those long melismatic chant melodies of the Catholic liturgy: trance-like waves of melody spinning out in protracted arcs, resting briefly and spinning out again before finally settling down, often where they started. Here we have a melocentric form that can be spacious and has a mystical transcendent association. What we lack is simultaneity.

 

         When a chant's melody is sung by choir, there might be some simultaneity if the voices are singing in octaves - remember those octaves from the overtone series? There might even be simultaneity if any of the singers are out of tune or make a mistake! The term for this is heterophony (which means many sounds). There are also traditions of improvising the melody at different intervals so that a melody becomes a sequence of chords (vertical collections of pitches). These are called "gymels" or "sites" and are associated with British medieval music of the late 12th and early 13th centuries. So far, so good. A bit technical, but not a bad start. What is missing is that sense of different waves moving simultaneously at different rates. All we have now are a series of simultaneous mid-tides at different pitch levels, not a particularly commodious model for the actual multiplicity of tides.

 

         For this element we have to up the level of complexity and move forward in time to an intricate form associated with 15th century Flemish music. This form is called a "mensuration canon." We all know what a canon is, even if we are not clear as to its meaning. Certainly, most of you have at least once sung "Three Blind Mice" or "Frere Jacques." These children's songs are simple canons. A canon is an imitative piece of music in which a melody sung in one voice is taken up by another. The melody is displaced by a small space, usually one complete metric unit or measure. Normally, every turn of melody in the lead voice is later taken up by the following voice, creating a gentle game of catch-up that is delayed until the canon's end.10

         Things get a bit trickier when we encounter a mensuration canon. First, we must wrestle with the daunting term "mensuration," which means measuring, and we will see why this is appropriate in a minute. One of the things that makes a mensuration canon so unorthodox is that all its voices begin at the same time, rather than proceeding in the "follow-the-leader" pattern of most canons. As if that weren't odd enough, how the melodies are indicated is quite arcane. Rather than write out the melody several times, four times in most cases, the composer writes the melody once and uses a group of special signs called "mensuration" or measurement signs that tell the performer how to measure the notes in his version of the canon. These signs tell him the length of each measure and the note values in these metric groupings. They also tell him how fast his version of the melody will progress, and what to do so that all (four) voices finish at the same time. It is as if we have four centipedes of different sizes all marching simultaneously on a precisely prescribed course. They all have the same number of legs, they are just different lengths, and, eventually, they will all arrive at the end of the course. But, since they have different leg lengths, the smaller ones will have to move all one hundred legs more times to cover the same distance the largest centipede will cover in just one cycle. The composition is much more complex in reality, but, you have the basic idea.

 

         Ideally, as in the overtone series and our thought journey, we might shift our focus from the bass line (the lowest and slowest of the canons) to the inner and upper lines, hearing them as discrete yet related permutations of the lowest and slowest melody. However, in practice, we will have an extremely difficult time actually doing this because of the complexity and simultaneous richness of the melodic material. You could certainly counter that the same thing might be said of sensing the pulses of the simultaneous tides moving at different rates, but, following that line will lead very far afield and we are so very close now!

 

         The mensuration canon meets the criteria of simultaneity and linearity but lacks the requisite element of sustained length. For instance, in the case of mass sections, such as the notoriously complex Proportion Mass of Johannes Ockegehm, which uses this procedure in all its sections, each movement might last up to 4 or 5 minutes. What we also lack is that fourth element, that Zen-like meditative quality, although the austere beauty of these intricate pieces belies their mathematical complexity.

 

         Having tried to ride this last wave of formal complexity, I hear my patient readers clamoring for surcease. Cries of "Basta! Basta!" (Enough, already!) fill the air. Patience, gentle reader! One more iteration and we will cease our slogging through mid-tide musical tropes (textual or musical accretions).

 

         For this final composition, we must travel forward some 500 years from the Byzantine complexities of Ockegehm and his obscure 15th century Flemish brethren to the 20th century German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928- ) and his work Stimmung (1968). The title translates as "Tuning," but it can also mean being in or out of tune with someone or something. This curious composition, written for six solo voices, has as its primary musical material a sustained overtone series. The fundamental is "sung" by a tape recorder that reproduces a single sustained pitch (a low B). The soloists sit in a circle facing each other and begin the composition by tuning up, sequentially finding the first six overtones above the fundamental, hence, the work's title. They also retune constantly, relocating and readjusting their assigned pitch, the only note they sing intermittently for well over an hour (they also speak as well).

 

         Stimmung consists of 51 sections and employs as its primary text names of ancient gods: Aztec, Mayan, Greek, Biblical, etc. There is also a poem written by the composer, which is recited at irregular intervals. In most of the piece's sections, these mystical names are intoned by the soloists in a carefully rehearsed manner, each voice taking turns introducing new names. A simplified process of how most of the composition is generated goes something like this. A singer introduces one of his assigned names, the others gradually join in, interjecting their assigned names or phrases and gradually leaving off what they are doing and joining him in chanting his magic name. Then another asserts her god's name, which gradually replaces its predecessor as the dominant text, with minor simultaneities and diversions of other magic words. The composition is therefore often quite complex and "busy," although rarely do we hear all the voices at once.11

 

         With Stimmung, we end our metapherreise (metaphor journey: and I sincerely apologize in advance to my German colleagues for this bastardization of their richly combinatorial language)! It combines all the requisite criteria in a surprisingly felicitous manner. It uses the overtone series as its sole melodic material, hence it is both melocentric and simultaneous. It uses a taped electronically generated fundamental that is unobtrusive, sustained and continuous. The upper overtones are sung by the performers in a non-continuous and improvisatory style, which combines structure and improvisation, both essential elements of sensing the tides themselves. The composition's considerable length, an average of approximately 74 minutes, certainly meets the third criterion. Also, this work's Eastern evocations and chanting techniques evoke the final element, an abstract Eastern quality. Stimmung more closely mirrors the tides' metaphysical approach to osteopathic work than any Western composition of which the author is aware. This then should explain why I did not use a Romantic Brahms symphony as my model and follow Shaver's fascinating speculations about symphonies as tides.

 

         This uniquely structured improvisation suggests the shape and quality of the tides, which are numerous and mutable. Stimmung's sense of suspended time and carefully rehearsed spontaneity is analogous to the practitioner's optimal state when working, that of receiving and allowing the tides to come into his hands, a precise yet indeterminate waiting for the arrival of a resonant system-wide confluence and resolution. It also evokes the multilinear listening and shifting perceptual awareness suggested in Shaver's quote, given at the start of this article. Even its title, which implies a "tuning in," serendipitously resonates with the manner in which the practitioner connects to, senses and interacts with these subtle tidal rhythms.

 

         For all its inherent complexities, this paper only considers a single aspect of the multifarious and subtle world of working with the tides. Interfacing with them and transmuting that experience into sound is an intriguing notion, as Shaver suggests above. However, other difficult questions, such as shifts in consciousness during the entrainment of client and patient, remain unexplored. In Stimmung, for instance, we see that this entrainment creates an unpredictable yet involving artwork that is magical and engaging. This is as far as the metaphor will carry us and begs further questions about the nature of interacting with the tides and following them in the search for a more perfect means of accessing and activating the innate health and understanding in us all.11

.

         Notes

 

         1. Energetic osteopathy is a subtle discipline that works with imbalances and restrictions in the body's inherent movements which are called the fluid tides.

 

         2. Personal correspondence from Shaver.

 

         3. One central issue is the biomechanical vs. biodynamic model for cranial osteopathy. For texts of the biomechanical model, see William Garner Sutherland's The Cranial Bowl: A Treatise Relating to Cranial Articular Mobility, Cranial Articular Lesions and Cranial Technic (reprint of the first edition, Mankato, MN: Free Press, 1994) and Harold Magoun and Harold Ives' Osteopathy in the Cranial Field, 3^rd edition, (Boise, ID: Northwest, 1976).

 

         4. Sills, Franklyn, Craniosacral Biodynamics. Vol. 1, The Breath of Life, Biodynamics, and Practical Skills. (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2001), pp. 37, 39.

 

         5. Bishop, Ray, "The Sonata Form Metaphor Reconsidered: Binary vs. Ternary Forms," Rolf Lines, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 2000), pp. 26-28. This paper will also offer additional indirect reasons for why sonata-form symphonic movements are such a poor model for the tides as musical form.

 

6. Levenson, Thomas, Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 26, and Johnston, Ian, Measured Tones: The Interplay of Music and Physics, reprint ed. (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1993), pp. 48-52.

 

         7. What is distressing is that in my quest to find a model, I overlooked this obvious misalignment, proof of how easily one is led astray in the desperate search for ephemeral relationships. For more on keys, scales and transposition, see the author's "Improvisation, Jazz and Rolfing®: Myofascial Metaphors on the 12-Bar Blues," Rolf Lines, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Fall 1999), pp. 36-39. There is some inconsistency in how octaves are indicated; for more on this issue, see "pitch names" in Willi Apel's Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 679. The system I use is deemed the most logical one!

 

8. This fanciful term (which might be called a gedankenreise) is a play on the term gedankenexperimenten or "thought experiments" associated with Albert Einstein. For examples of these thought experiments, see Gary F. Moring's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Einstein (Indianapolis: Pearson, Alpha, 2000), pp. 146, 163-73ff; A. Zee's Einstein's Universe: Gravity at Work and Play, reprint ed. (New York: Oxford), 2001, pp. 6-7, 12-14, 15-16ff; and Leonard Shlain's Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, reprint ed. (New York: Perennial, 1991), pp. 330-35. For a fascinating neurological explanation of hearing higher partials while performing, see William Benzon's Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (New York: Basic, 2001), pp. 23-25ff and backnote 1, pp. 283-84.

 

         9. From the definition of "canon" in Apel, Willi, above, pp. 124-27. The Ockegehm Proportion Mass is described briefly on p. 125.

 

         10. This description of Stimmung is based in part on liner notes from the CD, Stimmung, (Performed by) Singcircle, Gregory Rose, Director (London: Hyperion Records, 1986), and an internet biography of Stockhausen at Classical Net Basic Repertory List - Stockhausen, 2001.

 

         11. This conclusion, a later accretion, is an effort to briefly address issues of central interest to Shaver expressed in his response to the author after reading this paper.