The NATS Advocacy Committee, with the support of the National Student Auditions (NSA) Committee and NATS leadership, is supporting an endeavor to promote diversity in repertoire selection by choosing a different theme biennially. Our first initiative will be vocal music by women composers. We want to encourage the membership to program music by women for the upcoming competition and recital seasons. 

Our goal is to advance the repertoire of these composers by strong suggestion rather than by requirement. To that end we offer resources on the NATS website (by no means exhaustive): https://www.nats.org/Women_Composers_Initiative.html

Please join us in making this an opportunity to discover, learn, and teach wonderful new repertoire that celebrates the contributions of women composers to our rich song heritage.  We know that the 2019-20 audition season is quickly coming to a close, but we ask all chapters, districts and regions to endorse this initiative and include this information in their communication to their members. Some chapters have decided to offer a special audition award for the best performance of a composition written by a woman.  

We encourage NATS entities to add additional repertoire resources to the information already on the NATS web site by sending it to Loraine Sims, Chair of the NATS Advocacy Committee at lsims@lsu.edu.