When asked if her 25 years at Brandeis have taught her any life lessons she'd like to share, Prof. Sarah Mead (MUS), the director of the Early Music Ensemble, replied, "When I came, I was pretty much indistinguishable from the students. Now I look like people's mothers, but I still feel like I did then, just with more knowledge and experience." No one in the audience of the EME's Silver Anniversary concert could have doubted it. In an evening graced with several standout performances, no one on stage performed with more enthusiasm and expression than the director herself.

The program collected numbers from EME's past 25 years, selected by Mead because they were "signature pieces for this group," including works in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and, memorably, Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The sheer breadth of music covered, crossing both continents and centuries, not only kept the evening lively, but also spoke more profoundly to the ensemble's educational role for its student participants.

While the concert suffered the occasional tuning and synchronization glitches that are inevitable in live performances of any kind, for the most part the 17 students and alumni who sang and played Saturday night put on a spirited show, all the more remarkable due to the absence of a principal member, Drew Sambol '09, who was called away at the last minute for a family emergency-a fact that required other students, and sometimes the director, to step in and play or sing unfamiliar parts for the first time.

The evening featured a few especially talented performers, among them Erin Jerome (GRAD), whose skill with the harpsichord and the bass and tenor viols added expression and flair to the already able viol section. Two undergraduate sopranos, Megan Bisceglia '07 and Katherine Schram '09, also brightened the evening with their clear and assertive voices, especially in their solo pieces.

The EME will come under the direction of recorder expert Roy Sansom next semester while Mead enjoys a well-deserved leave. She plans to travel the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, teaching and working with ensembles.

"I'm hoping that the result will be a book," Mead says, "I think that's going to be my source of ideas for [EME] when I get back."

When the final piece in Saturday's concert was about to begin, Mead invited all of the past EME members in the audience to come on stage. The group of students and alumni that took the stage was as diverse as the music that had preceded it, despite being just a small sample of the network of EME alumni that stretches, according to Mead, from Cyprus to Romania to Japan. Mead pointed out that "in the 16th century, everybody who was educated sang, everybody read music and you were expected as an educated person to be able to play an instrument." For 25 years, Sarah Mead and her EME students, past and present, at home and abroad, have been bringing a little bit of traditions throughout time into the 20th and 21st centuries.