Jan Faix - Solmization Studies and Etudes

This exhibition presenting personal diaries is taking place at the Art Archive as part of the Polička/Shelf project.

The author’s book by experimental musician and poet Jan Faix entitled Solmization Studies and Etudes served as a basis for the author’s first book of experimental poetry, Solmization Variations, which as published by Polí5 in 2015.

When he purchased the notebook exhibited in October’s Polička/Shelf at the flea market in Kolbenova Street, it was still empty. But such a hand-bound notebook isn’t something from a supermarket. A few years later, he used it for an unusual experiment straddling the line between music and poetry, an experiment with solmization syllables that he worked on during the course of last year.

Faix’s book begins with dozens of pages of endless columns of solmization syllables. The chosen sets of combinations are gradually exhausted – and with each other the structure of individual poems and graphical scores is gradually relaxed. Gradually the author simplifies the variations and combinations and continues to work with them as wholes, for example reflecting their mirror image.

Jan Faix’s book Solmization Studies and Etudes can certainly be read in many ways, and the author provides opportunity for this. But I like most is primarily the unexpected and paradoxical combination of punk, minimalism, and Dadaism as it appears in the manuscript. The breadth with which Jan Faix approaches art perhaps exceeds the limits of many of us. Perhaps he sometimes exceeds even his own. But it’s a game he is aware of – an interesting one – and Dadaistically humorous.

Anna Pleštilová