Concert Chats

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Join Colleen Fay for her informative discussions about the concert music in the upstairs seminar room at Schlesinger Center starting one hour prior to each performance.

Colleen Fay was the Head of the former Performing Arts Library at the Kennedy Center, a joint project with the Library of Congress. As Director of the library during its entire existence from 1978 through 1992, Ms. Fay fashioned it into an incomparable resource for information in the performing arts, film and broadcasting. Prior to her tenure at the Kennedy Center, she was a music librarian at the Library of Congress.

Since 1986 she has been the music critic on Public Television’s arts panel program, “Around Town,” WETA-TV’s Emmy award-winning weekly television show devoted to the performing arts, visual arts, and motion pictures. Ms. Fay is also the Arts Editor and Contributing Editor to WAMU FM’s “Metro Connection,” a weekly radio program covering events in the Washington, D.C. area.

Ms. Fay writes regularly for the Washington Opera Magazine, Washington Review and WETA Magazine. Her program notes are featured in Stagebill magazine. Ms. Fay has written on subjects as diverse as Mozart operas, Gregorian chant and jazz.

She has lectured regularly for the Washington Bach Consort since 1993 and gave a series of lectures for that organization in Germany in July, 2000. She has lectured on the music of Bach, Monteverdi and Mendelssohn, and on the subject of criticism itself at Mount Vernon College, the Folger Library, George Mason University, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Cathedral and the Kennedy Center.

Ms. Fay is a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Composer Forum. She is also the Past-President of the Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archive. She is a current or former member of the Boards of several arts organizations in the Washington area.

As a singer, Ms. Fay has appeared with the Washington Opera, the Wolf Trap Opera, and Summer Opera Theatre. The Washington Post music critic called her singing, “stylistically impressive and particularly distinguished.” Ms. Fay is also a composer whose works have been performed in churches and synagogues and on national television; her most recent work has been published by Augsburg-Fortress Press of Minneapolis.

A recording of Ms. Fay’s compositions is supported by a grant from the D. C. Commission on Arts and Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Art.

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