The National Association of Teachers of Singing(NATS) celebrates the art of singing through a series of competitions and programs. They are designed to showcase the talented singers and performers who are soon to be rising stars in the profession.

National Student Auditions

Students of NATS members will begin by performing during their regional auditions. Five singers from each regional category will advance lo a national online screening round, where entrants will submit a video of their performances for judgment by a group of national judges.

Entry Fee: $75 per category

Prizes: S35,000 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places in total.

Deadline for Applications: April 13, 2021(applications by emailed invitation only; following regional auditions)

NATS Artist Awards(NATSAA)

Preliminary competitions are held at the regional level, with one winner picked out of each of the 14 NATS regions. The 14 semifinalists then gather at the site or the NATS Winter Workshop for the final two rounds of the competition.

Entry Fee: $75

Prizes: The winner is awarded $13,000; the 2nd place, $6,000.

Deadline for Applications: September 5,2021

Art Song Composition Award

The competition is open to any composer whose submined work meets the requirements. The winning composer will receive a cash award and a performance of the winning composition at the next scheduled NATS National Conference.

Entry Fee: $30

Prizes: The winner is awarded $5,000; the 2nd place, $2,500.

Deadline for Applications: December 1, 2021

National Music Theater Competition

The competition is seeking the best rising music theater soloists, those who just need one break to move their careers forward. Applicants must be between ages 20-28. Preliminary rounds of the competition are scheduled to take place in fall 2021 and about 24 singers advance to the semifinal and final rounds.

Entry Fee: $90.

Prizes: The first prize is awarded 55,000; the 2nd place, $52,000.

Deadline for Applications: May 15, 2021

If you tried to give rock ‘n’ roll another name, you might have called it Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry was 29 years old in 1955. He’d been playing mostly blues and R8B standards in a St. Louis club for several years. But he had started writing his own songs, combining elements of white country music. On a Friday night in May, 1955, he drove up to Chicago to catch a show by the blues great Muddy Waters. After the performance, he casually asked him, “How do you get in touch with a record company?”

“Why don’t you go and see Leonard Chess on 47th?” Muddy Waters replied.

So early Monday morning, Berry went to Chess Records and positioned himself in a store across the street. When Leonard Chess arrived, Berry ran over and made a pitch. Chess was impressed by the young man’s self-confidence and told him to come back with a tape of his own material, Berry returned the following week, bringing with him the other members of the club and four new songs.

“And we set the band up, and we played all four of them,” Berry said. “We don't know what they were saying, but they listened.”

Berry thought they were listening to “Wee Wee Hours”, a blues song. After all, Chess Records was known around Chicago as a blues label. But Leonard Chess was fascinated by "Ida Mae" that Berry had adapted from a traditional country tune called “Ida Red”.

Chess was sure the new song could be a hit, but he didn’t like the name. It was too rural (土气的).But nobody could think of a name. They looked around and saw a shoe box with “Maybellene” printed on it. Leonard Chess said, “Why don't we name it ‘Maybellene’?”

“Maybellene” quickly rose to No. l on the R&B chart. Two weeks later, it hit No. 5 on the all-important pop chart. In the years following “Maybellene”, Chuck Berry produced an astonishing string of hits, such as “Roll Over Beethoven” “School Days” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”

In 1972, Chuck Berry finally scored a number-one hit on the pop chart with an even more rural name: “My Ding-A-Ling”.

Briefly, music puts you in high spirits, which makes you better at studying - but it also distracts you, which makes you worse at studying. So if you want to study effectively with music on, you can try to reduce how distracting music can be, and increase the level to which music keeps you cheerful.

You may have heard of the Mozart effect -- the idea that listening to Mozart makes you “smarter”, which is based on research that found listening to complex classical music like Mozart improved test scores in mathematics. However, further research eventually debunked the Mozart effect theory: it had not really anything to do with maths; it was really just music that puts you in high spirits.

However, music can be a distraction under certain circumstances. When you study, you’re using your “working memory”--- that means you’re holding and handling several bits of information in your head immediately. The research is fairly clear that when there’s music in the background, especially music with vocals (歌唱 部分)，your working memory gets worse. Likely as a result, the reading comprehension ability is reduced when people listen to music with lyrics. Music also appears to be more distracting for people who are introverts (内向的人)than for people who are extroverts, perhaps because introverts are more easily overexcited.

Aiming to figure out the relative effect of these two competing factors — spirits and distraction, researchers had participants do a fairly demanding comprehension task, and listen to classical music which was either slow or fast, and which was either soft or loud. They found poor performances only occurred when people were listening to music that was both fast and loud.

To sum up, research suggests it’s probably fine to listen to music while you’re studying. But you’d better consider if the music puts you in high spirits, if it’s neither too fast nor too loud, if it’s less wordy, and if you’re not too introverted.