My name is Sonia Megías, I’m a Spanish composer here on a Fulbright grant. I began in the music world when I was really small… my family loves music and always supported my skills and motivated me to go forward with my musical passion! My very beginnings, when I was about 3 years old, were singing and playing melodies I heard on my little Casio keyboard… then, I learned to communicate through music. I compose whenever there’s a table where I can spread around some blank pages, pencils, erasers, markers, and rulers. Some composers that I admire are the ones who write without following a school; the brave ones that are not worried about adhering to a concrete aesthetic; the ones who just listen to the messages that they receive and aren’t afraid to share their ideas. For instance: Meredith Monk, Harry Partch, Phill Niblock, Moon Dog, Llorenç Barber, John Zorn, María de Alvear, Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe… Barber, Shostakovitch, Ligeti… I feel deeply grateful for being able to perceive the unlimited, and not less deeply I feel the compromise of transmitting it through limited forms. That’s the way I understand pieces of art: limited forms that connect human beings with the unlimited. Limited forms in space such as scores, or in time, such as musical moments. About my piece Pequeña Suite Peninsular (2004), that Washington Square Winds is going to perform in June: This piece was written as a commission from the “First Meeting of Young European Musicians” in Bordeaux, France and represents several dances from my country: Jota, from Aragón (north east), Muñeira, from Galicia (north west), and Bulería, from Andalucía (south). It is a short trip around Spain, with a big energy made by some modal melodies that quickly switch among the instruments, and by the imitation of the ethnic percussion instruments made by the performers of the quintet.