Sara & the Lute

Sara Salloum is a lute player and prizewinning music scholar who reenacts the performances of female musicians from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. She has performed in diverse settings, including historic houses and castles, cathedrals, galleries and museums, opera houses and concert halls, cafés and bars. Her doctorate brought her skills as a performing musician together with scholarship, and she developed fresh and original methods for conducting historical and musical research. Sara investigated the rich culture of women’s lute playing in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, including how women’s clothing influenced performance and how musical accomplishment shaped young women’s lives. Sara’s completed PhD thesis was recently commended by the Royal Musical Association when she was awarded the RMA Practice Research Prize 2025.

Sara’s passion for the lute developed through her childhood love of the classical guitar, which she treasured through an upbringing which involved an extraordinary amount of change. Of mixed Ukrainian and Lebanese heritage, Sara had experienced life on three different continents even before her sixth birthday, living in cities including London, Beirut, and Auckland, New Zealand. Her secondary education eventually concluded at a specialist music school in the north of Scotland. At university, Sara became the Royal Northern College of Music’s first lute student. She then completed music degrees at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford before completing her doctorate at Durham.

Sara now lives in North Yorkshire, where she applies her musicianship to a broad range of projects, including performance, university lecturing, and lute teaching, and she enjoys enrichening connections with fellow musicians and scholars.