Inspirations Behind Carl Schimmel: The Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master, or The Comical Hotch Potch

Acting out the alphabet is something we’ve all done, even if only the four letters of Y – M – C – A. In 1782, the printer Carington Bowles printed and sold a full physical alphabet under the name of The Comical Hotch Potch, or The Alphabet turn’d Posture-Master, to be sold at No. 69, St Paul’s Church Yard, London. The whole area around St Paul’s, London, was the heart of the printing and publishing business in the 18th and 19th centuries. It really only vanished with the bombing of Paternoster Row in WWII. The bombs missed the church but destroyed the surrounding streets and shops.

Carington Bowles (printer): The Comical Hotch Potch, or The Alphabet turn’d Posture-Master (1782)

‘Do but see this Comic Set | Of Fellows form the Alphabet’ says the inscription at the bottom of the image. Each letter also has a couplet:

A
He first finds the way,
To form a great A.
B
By a bright thought,
To a B he is brought.

Down to

Z
It will flick in my Gizzard
If I can’t make a Z.

The artist seems to be stretching it with his last rhyme! The postures vary from the very easy, such as L, to the nearly impossible, such as H or Q. Don’t try this at home! If you can’t stand on your head like the artists in letters A and N, or change from letter H to letter X, these are probably not ideas to add to your yoga set!

A ‘posture master’ was the 18th-century name for a contortionist, a profession that calls for extreme physical flexibility. The posture master Joseph Clark could stand on his left leg, raise his left arm into the air, all while putting his right foot behind his head.

Thornton (engraver): Joseph Clark of Pall Mall, the most extraordinary posture master that ever existed,
who exhibited every species of deformity, & dislocation, 1786 (London: Wellcome Collection)

The point of these alphabet sheets (and there were many different kinds of these) was to both amuse and teach the alphabet in a memorable manner. The little rhyming couplets helped reinforce the idea.

This human alphabet from 1794 uses the commedia dell’arte character of Pierrot to create an italic alphabet. It was also printed by Carington Bowles in London.

Bowles & Carver (printers): The Man of Letters or Pierrot’s Alphabet, 1794

That these letters continue to be used today is evident in this ad for MAC cosmetics with RuPaul.

MAC ad with RuPaul as V

American composer Carl Schimmel used Bowles’ image to create his music for The Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master, or The Comical Hotch-Potch. Written in 2008 for the Flexible Music Ensemble (Haruka Fujii, percussion; Eric Heubner, piano; Timothy Ruedeman, tenor saxophone; Daniel Lippel, electric guitar), Schimmel created his own ‘hotch-potch’ of ideas to contort musically.

Carl Schimmel: The Alphabet Turn’d Posture Master, or The Comical Hotch Potch (Flexible Music Ensemble, Ensemble)

The composer said about the work that ‘the flexible and the lexical have been combined, as in the original print. In the lexical sections, the music contorts to form the shapes of letters of the alphabet; in the flexible sections, the notes stretch and slide, by half-step, from one chord to the next. The work is built around a unifying set of building blocks made of ‘special four-note chords’.

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